His grandfather’s pride had left him alone for fifteen years, and in that aloneness he had built a night school in a courtyard and become the kind of person a whole neighborhood would fill a hospital for.

He would not have chosen any of it.

No one would.

But he had stopped, somewhere in the last years, wishing his story had been different, because wishing it different was just another way of letting it hurt him, and he was done being hurt by things that were finished.

What he did instead was put the story to work.

Every file he opened now was a door he could hold ajar for a child who had been taught, as he had been taught, that no door would ever open.