The lesson that mattered was not that she had picked the wrong target, one who turned out to have a powerful husband.

The lesson that mattered, the one she finally learned guiding a stranger to a register, was that there had never been a right target, that the wrongness had never been in her math but in her heart, that a person who is only kind when kindness is safe has never been kind at all.

She wept in that restroom not for her lost fortune.

She wept because she had finally met herself, and could no longer look away.