It was not a thing he had done in fifty years — sat on a floor.

His knees protested.

He did it anyway.

And one of the younger students, a girl of perhaps nine who did not know or care that the old man beside her owned half the hotels she had ever walked past, leaned against his arm the way tired children do, and fell asleep against the sleeve of a suit that cost more than her family earned in a year, and Aurelio sat very still so as not to wake her, and felt something in his chest that he had no name for, because he had spent his whole life too high up and too well guarded to have ever felt it before.

He had given millions to charities, over the years — galas, plaques, his name on a wing of this very hospital.