That is a gift almost beyond price, to a person accustomed to invisibility, and Clara understood, watching Lupita in her new blazer, that the seeing mattered even more than the reward.

Anyone can be promoted.

To be finally, truly seen, after sixteen years of being looked through, is a different order of thing.

Clara had not invented Lupita’s worth that night; it had been there, unremarked, for sixteen years.

She had simply, at last, been the person who saw it, and named it, and refused to let it stay invisible any longer.

Lupita wiped a tear from her cheek, smiling, as Lily scrambled off the bed to inspect the pancakes.