My 8-year-old son gave up his lunch money to buy a little girl with Down syndrome a red dress—the next morning, our lawn was covered with lunchboxes, but what was inside the biggest one made him go pale.

Then on the Saturday she was at the party. Standing at the back, by the fence, with a paper cup.

And she watched a two-year-old grab a red skirt in both fists and spin herself over into the grass and get up and do it again.

And she watched my son sit down on a step laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe.

And she said — and this is the sentence, and I wrote it down that night —

“He was right and I was wrong, and I’ve been saying that sort of thing my whole life, and I’m sixty-six and I don’t have time to say it out loud to enough people.”

She had the box on the kitchen table by ten o’clock that night.

I want to be honest about the next bit, because the neat version of this story ends there and the real one didn’t.

You cannot just give somebody eighteen thousand four hundred dollars in cash.