“No waitress,” I told Arthur, looking down at the state seal on the charter, “should ever have to choose between paying her rent and covering an empty booth.

Not one.

Not ever again, if I can help it.

Arthur, when I first described what I wanted to build, looked at me for a long moment with an expression I could not quite read, and then he told me that my mother had said something almost identical to him, once, long ago, about the workers in our family’s company.

It was, he said, the same instinct in me that had been in her, the refusal to look away from the people the system was built to overlook.