“Then you know what to do.”

He handed me a seed packet and asked whether I would help him speak with the apprentices.

I agreed, provided he spoke to them as workers with ideas, not as people waiting for a rich man’s kindness.

He promised he would.

Our lives still held difficult conversations.

I still sometimes worried that an old habit of secrecy could return.

He still had to fight the impulse to fix problems with resources before asking what I wanted.

We named those habits when they surfaced.