Told her to come back when she’d sorted herself out.

The next morning she had been found at a bus stop, gone, of the cold.

“Ever since that morning,” the old man said, and wiped his eyes without shame, “I made a promise.

That if life ever put a person in front of me, asking for a door to be opened — I would never, as long as I lived, be the one who locked it.

Not ever again.”

I have thought about that vow every day since.