But I found that I could not.

The faces of my coworkers were too clear in my mind, the ones still inside, still emptying their envelopes, still swallowing it.

I had not been rescued because I deserved it more than they did.

I had been rescued by pure blind luck, by a binder dropped behind a booth, by a mother’s foresight and an uncle’s persistence, by a chain of accidents that had nothing to do with merit.

And it seemed to me that if luck was the only thing that separated me from the people still trapped in that life, then the only decent thing to do with my luck was to spread it, to become for strangers the thing that no one had been for me until that morning.