The people behind the desk had never been that tired stranger.

They had been trained in graciousness but had never needed it themselves, and so their graciousness was a costume they put on for the guests who looked like they belonged and took off for the ones who didn’t.

Bea’s kindness was not a costume.

It was scar tissue.

She had been left out in the cold enough times that she could not bear to watch it happen to someone else, could not walk past a tired father with a sleeping child and a handful of bent flowers without something in her old wounds calling out to answer his.

That, Wescott understood, was the thing his expensive training programs had never once produced and could not produce: the specific compassion of a person who has actually needed compassion.