And for most children, thank God, that map is accurate.

But it was not accurate for me, not that night, and the discovery that my own map was inverted, that the danger had been at home all along and the safety had come from a stranger in an alley, was its own kind of vertigo, a reordering of the world that I am still, years later, learning to stand upright inside.

Because if the people who made you can be the ones who try to unmake you, then nothing is guaranteed, no bond is automatic, no love is owed simply by blood.

And yet the same night that taught me that terrible lesson also taught me its consoling opposite: that a man who owed me nothing, who had never met me, who had every ordinary excuse to keep driving toward his own warm home, could stop, and give me his coat, and stay with me in the cold.