For years these same people had nodded politely at me as the chief strategy officer’s pleasant wife and then forgotten me before I was out of the room.

Now they looked at me and saw the person who had kept their mortgages paid and their children’s schools affordable and their own sense of their futures intact, and the looking was so different that it was almost like being made visible for the first time.

Malcolm found me near the edge of the stage and put a hand briefly on my shoulder, the uninjured one, with great care.

“Your mother,” he said, “would have enjoyed that more than she’d ever have admitted.”