It was one specific thing, and I did not register it until I had gone years without it: he never, not once, asked me to make myself smaller so that he could feel larger.

He never treated my calling as competition.

When I talked about a hard case, he leaned in.

When the hospital took me away, he did not keep score.

I had spent two years being told, in a hundred small ways, that the best thing about me was an inconvenience.

And here was a man who simply, plainly, treated it as one of the reasons he admired me.

It is a low bar, when you write it down.