Twenty-one days in which a man asked me to sit down nineteen times and I did it once, for twelve minutes, on the last Tuesday, with my coat on.

Two years of five-minute mornings in which I never once asked a man a question about his own life.

And the thing I did not see coming, which is not grief and which has not gone:

I cannot accept a compliment about it.

People find out and they say a version of the same sentence — that it was a beautiful thing to do, that not many people would have — and something in me goes rigid, and I change the subject, and I have been told by two people that I do it rudely.

Because I know what I said yes to and I know why, and the reasons are on a list in Part Five with the worst one at the top.