You care more about strangers than about me. And because I loved him, and because criticism from someone you love has a terrible authority, I had half-believed him.

I had come to think of my own loyalty as a flaw I needed to manage, an excess I should apologize for, a problem in myself to be corrected.

And then a different man looked at the identical trait — not a changed version of it, not a softened or reduced version, the same loyalty, unmodified — and called it the best thing about me.

Nothing about me had changed between those two verdicts.