Later, I sat alone in my office and wondered whether Walter would have approved of that caution.

The young me had given away all her money without a budget meeting.

The older me was responsible for making help dependable for many strangers.

I opened his letter again.

He had written that what mattered was the absence of humiliation, not the absence of judgment.

Good judgment could be kind.

Rules could protect people as much as they could exclude them, depending on how they were written and applied.

I placed Rafael’s letter beside the latest quarterly report.