He had never once sat on a floor at three in the morning while a stranger’s child slept on his arm, waiting to learn whether a boy would live.

He understood, dimly, that everything he had ever called generosity had been done from a great and comfortable distance, and that this — this floor, this child, this unbearable shared waiting — was something else, something he had been too rich to know existed.

Across the hall, Mireya caught his eye and, without a word, brought him a paper cup of terrible coffee, and he took it and thanked her as humbly as he had ever thanked anyone, and drank it, and waited with the rest of them for the dawn.

Chapter 29 — Dawn