He sat on a step at his own grandmother’s party for four or five minutes, ten years old, in a shirt somebody had bought him that week, with thirty-two strangers on the other side of a door who had spent the evening telling him he looked like his father.

Then he wiped his face with the back of his wrist — and I want to be clear that he was not sobbing, he was doing the thing children do where they are managing it — and stood up and went back in.

I have thought about that boy on those stairs more than I have thought about almost any other part of that night.

Because whatever else was true, and however much of my life came apart in that building, there was a ten-year-old in it who had been produced, that evening, as an item of good news.