Darnell’s two five-gallon buckets were not a service; they were a boy choosing, over and over, to belong somewhere.

That is the importance I had never once had, in all my accomplished years — the plain, unpurchasable importance of simply being one of the people who showed up and stayed.

I would have traded every title I ever held for that dusk, and I did not even have to.

I only had to walk through a gate I’d almost walked past.

Chapter 11 — Mare