Prime ministers took my calls.

And here I was, remade, counting a public invitation to a free lecture as the most precious thing anyone had handed me in thirteen years, because of who had handed it and what it cost him to hand it.

That was the measure of how far I had fallen and, I was beginning to understand, of how far I had finally started to climb — not back up the mountain of money, which I would never climb again and no longer wanted to, but up the far harder slope of becoming a person a boy like Hugo might, someday, years from now, decide to call something other than sir.

There was no guarantee he ever would.