I had made a kind of peace with all of it, the good tables and the bad, because the good ones made the bad ones bearable and the whole thing, on balance, kept us afloat.

I was good at the job.

I was fast and attentive and I could carry a heavy tray and a heavy heart at the same time and let neither of them show.

What I had not yet learned, on the night of the couple in the corner booth, was that the feeling of being invisible, the thing I thought was just the background hum of the work, was about to become the entire center of my story, first as the wound and then, much later, as the thing I would spend my new life making sure no one else had to feel.

I have thought a great deal since about what invisibility actually does to a person, because I lived inside it for years without quite having a word for it.