She heard my brother’s voice on that recording, and she did the most ordinary thing in the world, the thing that should require no courage at all: she was appalled.

She looked at a man laughing about a dying stranger and she recoiled from him, cleanly, without calculation, because something in her had not been trained out of basic decency the way it had been trained out of the people I grew up with.

It is a low bar, being horrified by cruelty.

It should be the easiest thing a person ever does.

But I had lived my whole life among people who could not clear it, who met every cruelty with an excuse or a shrug or a change of subject, and so watching Megan clear it so effortlessly was strangely moving to me, even in the middle of everything.

She reminded me, at the moment I most needed reminding, that the coldness I had grown up inside was not the water everyone swims in.