Now the midday sun poured down over a campus full of bright hopeful young people, one of them my sister, safe and free, and I knew, with a certainty that settled all the way down into my bones, that no one was ever going to make me feel invisible again, and that I was going to spend the rest of my life making sure that as few people as possible ever had to feel that way at all.

I stood, and I adjusted my coat, and I took my uncle’s arm.

“Come on, Uncle Arthur,” I said, smiling.

“We have an office to open, and somewhere out there tonight there is a waitress staring at an empty payment tray, being told it is her fault, emptying her envelope into someone else’s hand, feeling as invisible and alone as I once felt.

We cannot reach all of them.

But we can reach some.

And every one we reach is one more person who learns, on the worst night of their month, that they were never invisible after all, that someone saw them, that the world is not only made of people who look away.”