He didn’t answer for a long moment.

Some truths don’t ask for a reply.

They ask for reverence.

And he understood, in that quiet, why Bea had been the one to cross the lobby when everyone else looked away — why it had been the housekeeper and not the people paid to be gracious.

It was not that she was a better person by nature.

It was that she had been him. She had stood, some version of her, in some lobby or some office or some bus aisle, holding tired children, carrying more than she could comfortably carry, hoping for one small mercy from someone with the power to give it — and she remembered, in her body, exactly how it felt when that mercy did not come.