My mother’s fortune made it affordable, for me and, through the foundation, for strangers, and in doing so it turned the law from a wall that kept people like me out into a door we could finally walk through.

“Including my old job?” I asked Arthur, when he told me, because I could not help it.

He gave me a small, cold, satisfied smile, the smile of a man who had been waiting to deliver exactly this news.

“Especially your old job,” he said.

Julian, faced with the choice between a full corporate audit and cooperation, had surrendered the restaurant’s illegal deduction ledgers to the state labor board, and had been forced to issue back-pay checks to fourteen current and former servers who had been made to cover walkouts over the years.

And mine, Arthur said, reaching into the file, had arrived at his office the day before.