Who were, at that very moment, being told that a walkout was their problem, emptying their own envelopes, swallowing it because they needed the job.

I walked out free.

But I did not walk out able to forget them.

I think that is the moment the foundation was truly born, though I would not sign a single document for months.

It was born in the doorway of that restaurant, in the specific refusal to let my own good fortune become amnesia.

Because there is a temptation, when you escape something terrible, to simply run, to put as much distance as you can between yourself and the bad years and never look back, and no one would have blamed me for it.

I had suffered; now I was saved; I was entitled, surely, to enjoy it.