All these years?” And I said no, Emmitt, what was I.

And he said, “You were the proof we were still here.” And that is the finest thing anyone has ever said to me, and I have decided it will go on my stone someday, though not for a good while yet.

But it was the whole of that morning, not just Emmitt’s words, that undid me and remade me both, and I have to try to say why.

For thirty-one years I had been the one who saw.

That was my role, my gift, my whole quiet purpose — I was the watcher, the noticer, the one who paid attention to ninety people who mostly went unattended.

And there is a loneliness buried inside that role that I had never once let myself feel: the watcher is not, herself, watched.