Across the courtyard, Coraline looked up, and her eyes met mine, and though she didn’t wave, the serene lake of them rippled with a quiet acknowledgment.

She knew the road I was walking.

She knew how much it cost, and she knew it was the only one that led anywhere.

I understood exactly how small the thing I had been given was, and I understood, too, that its smallness was the whole point.

A year earlier, if you had told me that I would one day stand in a courtyard in New Jersey weeping with gratitude because a teenager had invited me to a public seminar — an invitation he extended to total strangers by the dozen — I would have laughed in your face.

I was Roderick Wolcott.