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.

But the lawn happened because a woman who works in a school cafeteria noticed a boy taking a water and sitting down with nothing, and then quietly fed him for five and a half weeks without telling a single soul.

And the metal box happened because a sixty-six-year-old woman lay awake on a Thursday night working out that the wrong thing she’d said had been said in front of witnesses.

Neither of those is a big gesture. Both of them are somebody noticing something small and then not letting it go.

And the thing that started all of it was an eight-year-old who looked at a two-year-old in a stroller and decided, on his own, with no adult involved at any point, that she would look like a princess in a red dress.

He was wrong about one thing.

He said she’d look like a princess.