I did not start it to build a monument, and it is not one; it is three rooms and a phone line and a handful of people who answer it.

I started it because Winifred’s letter had asked me a question I couldn’t put down — what is the point of surviving a thing, if you take the lesson of it to your grave the way she almost took hers?

She had spent a life being too polite to interfere, and the interference she finally permitted herself, one whispered sentence from a wheelchair, had cost her nothing and saved my life.

I wanted to be the person on the other end of that sentence for someone else.

Not a hero — Winifred was right that she was no hero; she had simply, once, refused to stay quiet.

That was all any of us had done.