When I finally sat up, he had laid several documents out in a neat row across my desk.
“Samuel Crane,” he said, “was the founder of Crane Logistics. By the time he passed last month, it employed four thousand people across six states.”
I stared at him.
The shaking man under the awning.
Four thousand people.
“He never married again,” Mr. Pennington went on. “He had no children. He spent the back half of his life giving most of what he earned away, almost always anonymously, almost always to people the world had decided not to see. He had a word for them. He called them ‘the uncounted.’ He said a girl taught him that everyone deserves to be counted. He never told me her name until the end.” The lawyer’s own voice thickened. “It was you, of course. It was always you.”
He slid the final document forward.
