She nodded like she’d expected exactly that. “I know you are,” she said. Then, after a pause: “You had a law degree. A corner office. $240,000 a year.” She said the number the same flat way I probably say case figures in a courtroom.

Just a number on a page. “And you couldn’t show up once.”

I didn’t have an answer for that. I had explanations. I’d had twenty-two years to build a very thorough set of explanations. But in that booth, across from her, every single one of them felt like what they probably were, which was a story I’d told myself so many times it had started to feel like the truth.

She finished her coffee. She didn’t order anything else. And then she reached into her bag and slid the business card across the table toward me. I picked it up. Read it.

“I named it Second Door,” she said, “because every child who walks through mine gets what I never got from you.”

I said, “What’s that?”

She looked at me for a second. Just looked. “Someone who stayed.”

Then she picked up her bag and she left. She wasn’t cruel about it. She didn’t slam anything or make a scene. She just left, the way you leave after a meeting that’s over, and I sat there in that booth for I don’t even know how long after she walked out.

I drove home with the business card on the passenger seat. I looked up Second Door Foster Services that night. It’s real. It has a website and a staff page and Keisha’s photo is right there at the top, professional headshot, same eyes. The organization serves kids in three counties in Georgia. She’s been running it for four years.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with any of this yet. I haven’t called her. I don’t think she’s waiting for me to. She didn’t give me her card because she wants a relationship. I think she gave it to me so I’d know that she turned what I did into something that actually helps people, and that she did it completely without me.

The shoebox with the birthday cards is still in my closet. Twenty years of envelopes with my handwriting on them, all of them unopened, all of them sent back.

I think about Miss Doreen a lot now. Sixty-two years old, bad knee, working a laundromat job, four kids cycling through a two-bedroom apartment. Showed up every single day.

I had a corner office and I couldn’t show up once.

I’m not sure what I thought writing this out would do. I think I just needed someone else to know that I know.