I have come to believe that this whole story is, at its heart, about a single quiet truth that our world mostly gets backward, and it is this: that the things you give away without expecting anything in return are the only things that ever truly come back to you.

I did not comfort dying strangers in order to be rewarded.

The entire point, the entire meaning of it, was that those people could give me nothing, that my kindness to them was spent into a void that could never repay it, and it was precisely that quality, the pure uncalculated giving-for-nothing, that made it real, that made it heal my grief, and that, unknown to me, caught the attention of an old tailor watching from his window.

Julian saw me give love to people who could not repay it, and he understood something about me that I did not understand about myself: that I gave freely, that my kindness was, in his phrase, unpolluted by the promise of reward.