It seemed to me the only fitting thing to do with money that had come from such a woman.

She had spent her whole life being no one’s priority.

In her name, a great many forgotten people would now be someone’s.

I go and sit with some of them, still — the old ones the foundation looks after, the ones whose children have drifted the way Fiona’s drifted.

I hold their hands.

I listen to them tell the same stories twice.

I have learned to recognize, in the way an old person watches a door, the particular loneliness I spent twelve years learning to read on one weathered face, and I have made it the whole purpose of what I do to answer that watching, so that someone fills the doorway before the light goes out of the waiting.