He spoke first.

He put a question in the air that I would have had to be ruder than I am to walk away from, and in answering it I stepped, without deciding to, through the one threshold that changed everything.

I have been grateful to him for a lot of things since.

Mostly I am grateful that he did not wait for me to find my own courage, because I am not sure, that gray morning, that I would have.

Chapter 3 — Plot Twelve