The moment I opened the door to my department chief’s office and saw the old man from the cafeteria sitting across from her desk in a charcoal suit with a Houston Methodist badge clipped to his lapel, my body forgot how to move.

Three weeks earlier, he had been standing in line on the second floor with a bowl of oatmeal, a paper cup of coffee, and ears gone red over a seven-dollar balance. Now he sat with one ankle crossed over the other, hands folded loosely, as if this was exactly where he belonged and exactly where he had always belonged. He looked at me the same way he had looked at me that morning in the cafeteria—steady, unreadable, almost patient.

My hand was still on the doorknob.

I think I actually stopped breathing.

From behind her desk, Dr. Patricia Okafor looked up and said, in the calm voice she used when she wanted a resident to understand that this was not a conversation to fumble, “Close the door, Sarah.”

I did.

But my legs barely remembered how to carry me to the chair.

By the time I sat down, I had already gone through half a dozen explanations in my head, and none of them made sense. Maybe he was a donor. Maybe he was on the board. Maybe I had imagined the cafeteria entirely. Maybe sleep deprivation had finally burned a hole clean through my frontal lobe and this was the sort of hallucination you got after twenty-eight months of residency and too many overnight calls.

He gave the slightest nod, as if he could hear every panicked thought trying to line itself up behind my eyes.

“I believe we’ve met,” he said.

That was where the story snapped in two.

But to explain why that moment hit like a defibrillator to the chest, I have to back up to the kind of Tuesday morning that makes you question whether medicine is calling or just highly structured emotional damage.

I was twenty-eight months into my internal medicine residency at Houston Methodist, which meant I had mastered exactly two things: functioning on four hours of sleep and making terror look like composure.

If you’ve never worked in a major American hospital, let me explain the particular scale of it. Houston Methodist is not a building. It is a city with badges. Forty-two floors, three connected towers, service corridors that feel like tunnels beneath an airport, overhead signs pointing you in three directions at once, elevators that never come when you need them and always arrive full when they do. You can work the same service for months and still get lost trying to find radiology if you come at it from the wrong stairwell.

The cafeteria in the main tower was on the second floor, near a hallway that always smelled faintly of industrial cleaner and overbrewed coffee. On good days there was breakfast that resembled breakfast. On bad days there was oatmeal, sad eggs, and something under a heat lamp pretending to be potatoes. I ate there more mornings than I want to admit—usually around 6:15, before rounds, when the place was still only half awake and the only sounds were the hiss of the coffee machine, the low hum of refrigerators, and the distant clatter of trays being stacked for the lunch shift.

Those twenty minutes mattered more than they should have. I would buy coffee, something hot, and sit at the same corner table beneath the window where the sunrise never actually reached but the light changed enough to trick your brain into believing morning had begun. It was the last stretch of the day when I still felt like a person instead of an instrument.

That particular Tuesday in November, I was already running three minutes behind and carrying the kind of shame that makes coffee feel medicinal.

The night before, Dr. Harmon had pulled me aside after evening rounds. He was one of those attendings who never needed to raise his voice because disappointment was his preferred scalpel. Tall, controlled, silver at the temples, always perfectly pressed, he moved through the hospital with the kind of authority that made interns stand straighter without knowing why. He was not a screamer. I would almost have preferred a screamer. Yelling is crude and obvious. Dr. Harmon specialized in precision.

He had waited until the hallway cleared, then held out my progress note on a patient in room 412 between two fingers as though it were mildly contaminated.

“This is embarrassingly thin,” he said quietly. “If you cannot produce documentation that reflects actual clinical thought, you should seriously reconsider whether internal medicine is the right field for you.”

He said it in a low, almost gentle tone.

That was what made it hurt.

Anyone can survive being shouted at. It becomes theater. Public. Easy to resent. But being spoken to softly, like a failing student being offered a final kindness, left nowhere for anger to go. The words just landed and stayed there.

I went home after that and rewrote the note four times.

The first version had been fine. I knew it had been fine. By the second rewrite I was just moving words around. By the third I was trying to anticipate which phrases would sound more “thoughtful” to him. By the fourth I was no longer editing the note at all—I was editing myself, trying to figure out which version of my mind might finally be acceptable to the man reading it.

At two in the morning I was still awake in my apartment in the Museum District, staring at the ceiling fan and wondering if he was right.

So no, I was not in a generous mood the next morning.

I just wanted coffee and enough calories to keep my hands steady through morning rounds.

The cafeteria line was short. One person ahead of me.

He looked to be in his late sixties, maybe early seventies, white hair clipped close, posture too straight to be accidental. He was wearing a faded flannel shirt tucked into khakis that had once been sharply ironed and were now trying to remember it. His tray held a bowl of oatmeal, a cup of coffee, and a small glass of orange juice. There was something dignified about the spareness of it. It looked less like breakfast and more like ritual.

The cashier—a woman in her fifties with reading glasses hanging on a cord and the expression of someone who had been dealing with malfunctioning badge cards since before dawn—swiped his card, glanced at the screen, then looked back up.

“Sir, it’s showing a seven-dollar balance on the card. You’ll need a different form of payment.”

He patted one jacket pocket, then the other, then his pants pockets. Not theatrically. Not the exaggerated frisking of someone making a joke out of being unprepared. Just slow, controlled surprise.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I must have left my other card upstairs.”

His voice was low and unhurried, the kind of voice people are used to listening to. But his ears had gone red. That is what I remember most clearly. Not his face. Not the oatmeal. His ears.

The cashier glanced toward the line behind him. I was the only person there, but she still wore the look of someone trying to balance patience against policy.

“I can hold the tray at the station while you go get it,” she said.

He looked down at the oatmeal for a second. Only a second.

Then he started to push the tray toward her.

I still don’t know exactly why I did what I did next.

It was not sainthood. It was not instinctive generosity. It was not because I was having a good morning and wanted to spread joy through the healing power of breakfast carbohydrates. I was tired, anxious, humiliated, and already mentally rehearsing whatever answer Dr. Harmon was going to demand of me on rounds.

But something about watching a man in his late sixties turn red over seven dollars in front of a bowl of cafeteria oatmeal scraped against me in exactly the wrong way.

Before either of them could respond, I handed the cashier a ten.

“I’ve got it.”

The man turned and looked at me.

It is a very particular look people give when they are trying to determine whether they have just been helped or exposed, because those are not the same thing, and dignity often lies in the difference.

“You don’t have to do that,” he said.

“It’s oatmeal,” I said. “Please don’t worry about it.”

He held my gaze for a moment longer than most strangers would.

Then he nodded once.

“Thank you.”

Not reflexive. Not casual. Deliberate.

The cashier rang the rest through, handed me change and a receipt I didn’t want, and the whole thing was over. He took his tray. I took mine. We moved in separate directions through the same fluorescent morning.

I sat at my usual corner table, drank my coffee, and tried to forget him.

The rest of that Tuesday was the kind of hospital day that doesn’t feel survivable while you’re in it and then vanishes into a blur the second you finally get home.

I had seven patients on my list. Two had developed complications overnight that, according to Dr. Harmon, my previous documentation should have made me “more alive to.” Rounds on his service were run like cross-examinations. He would ask questions he already knew the answer to, listen to you miss by an inch, then let the silence sit just long enough for everyone on the team to feel the weight of the miss. He never embarrassed you with volume. He embarrassed you with stillness.

That morning I stumbled twice—once on a medication interaction and once on the likely source of a fever that, in retrospect, should have been obvious. After rounds he didn’t say anything directly to me. He just handed back my printed patient list with three entries circled in red pen and walked away.

I stood in the hallway holding that paper for probably thirty seconds, alone, and seriously considered calling my mother, which is not something doctors in residency are supposed to admit.

My co-resident found me in the workroom an hour later. He was six months ahead of me in the program, which in residency years is the difference between infancy and civilization. He set a coffee beside my keyboard without saying anything, which was how I knew he had either witnessed rounds or heard about them.

“Harmon?” he asked.

“Harmon,” I said.

He pulled up a chair.

“You know Martinez told me he once circled a typo in red pen and handed the note back without a word.”

“That somehow makes me feel worse,” I said.

He nodded. “It’s designed to.”

My co-resident had a theory about attendings like Dr. Harmon. He believed they had been trained the same way—humiliation as pedagogy, fear as discipline, precision mistaken for cruelty until cruelty itself felt educational. He didn’t think Harmon was malicious. He thought Harmon was a man who had been broken in a specific direction and now reproduced that break efficiently in everyone beneath him, convinced he was improving the species.

I appreciated the theory.

I did not find it comforting.

The weeks that followed settled into a punishing rhythm. I came in earlier. I documented more carefully. I read more than I had ever read in my life. I started carrying a small notebook in my coat pocket—not for patient data, but for the questions Dr. Harmon asked so I could make sure I would know the answers next time. I stayed late. I reviewed cases on days off. Once I came in on a Sunday to follow up on a patient whose trajectory had been bothering me and caught a finding that changed the treatment plan. Dr. Harmon acknowledged it on Monday with a single nod and then moved on.

I told myself the nod meant something.

I was not sure I believed it.

About three weeks after the morning in the cafeteria, I saw the old man again.

I had stepped off the elevator on the second floor to grab a late lunch before afternoon clinic. He was standing near the cafeteria entrance in the same flannel and khakis, speaking with a hospital administrator I recognized but could not name—a woman in her forties who always looked as if she were on her way to deliver bad news professionally.

They were having what appeared to be a quiet, serious conversation. She stood with her hands clasped in front of her, nodding in the particular way people nod when they are listening very carefully to someone whose opinion matters.

He saw me before I could decide whether to acknowledge him.

He gave me the same slight nod he had given me in line that morning.

Unhurried. Self-possessed. Not a flicker of embarrassment now.

I smiled automatically and kept walking, but the image followed me all afternoon. It wasn’t dramatic. Just wrong enough to stay in the mind. Like seeing a teacher at the grocery store when you were a child—nothing is actually out of place, but your brain resists the overlap.

The next morning I was summoned to Dr. Okafor’s office.

Her office sat on a quieter administrative corridor near the internal medicine conference rooms, a place where residents only went when something had happened. Dr. Patricia Okafor had been chief of internal medicine for eleven years. She was precise, demanding, and fair in a way that felt almost old-fashioned in a hospital that large. She did not flatter. She did not waste time. When she told you good work, it meant the work was good. When she corrected you, it was because you had been wrong and she expected you to survive knowing it.

She did not summon residents casually.

I knocked. She said come in. I opened the door.

And there he was.

No flannel. No khakis. Charcoal suit, perfectly cut. White shirt. Dark tie. Hospital system badge clipped to his lapel.

The same face. The same stillness. The same eyes.

“Close the door, Sarah.”

I sat down because my body understood authority better than my mind understood reality.

For a few seconds nobody spoke.

Then the man leaned forward slightly and said, “I believe we’ve met.”

His name was Dr. Robert Caulfield.

For thirty-two years he had worked at Johns Hopkins in research, clinical practice, medical education, and eventually administration. For the previous four years he had been consulting quietly for major hospital systems across the country, assessing what he called the distance between what an institution claims to value and what it actually rewards. Houston Methodist had brought him in for a six-week assessment before the board made a final decision about a new chief medical officer.

He had not announced himself.

That, as he explained, had been intentional.

I sat there trying to absorb this in pieces because taking it all in at once was beyond the operating capacity of a resident brain at 7:45 in the morning.

Dr. Caulfield folded his hands.

“I want to be straightforward with you, Dr. Mitchell, because I think you deserve that.”

His voice was careful without being polished, the kind of voice that makes you trust the silence around the words as much as the words themselves.

“I spent five weeks walking these floors,” he said. “I sat in on rounds when possible. I ate in the cafeteria. I rode elevators. I asked questions when people were willing to answer them. I watched a great many interactions.”

I thought immediately of the oatmeal, the red ears, the tray being pushed away.

“You left your card upstairs on purpose,” I said.

At that, something around his eyes shifted. Not exactly amusement. Recognition.

“I left my wallet upstairs,” he said. “Whether that was on purpose is a more complicated question.”

Dr. Okafor watched both of us with an expression I could not read. Professional, yes. But also measuring.

“I was curious what the line behind me would do,” he continued. “Most mornings, people looked at their phones.”

I felt heat rise into my face that had nothing to do with pride. The whole thing suddenly seemed absurd. Seven dollars. Oatmeal. Me, sleep deprived and irritated, stepping into a moment I did not understand because I was too tired not to.

Then his tone changed almost imperceptibly.

“However, the cafeteria is no longer the part of this conversation I’m focused on.”

He lifted a folder from the edge of Dr. Okafor’s desk and opened it. I recognized the formatting immediately: a clinical observation report, dense with notes, timestamps, service line references, highlighted passages. The kind of document used for accreditation reviews and internal assessments that can shift careers without ever becoming public.

“I observed Dr. Harmon’s rounds on your service four separate mornings,” he said. “And I observed how he spoke to residents. All residents. Not just you.”

He closed the folder gently.

“There is a version of rigor that produces excellent physicians,” he said. “And there is a version that produces physicians who become very, very afraid and learn to pass that fear on. Those are not the same thing. The difference matters enormously for patients.”

I didn’t answer. Not because I disagreed. Because agreement felt too dangerous. Residents learn quickly that naming a problem is sometimes treated as creating it.

Dr. Caulfield watched me for a second.

“You documented a finding three weeks ago on a patient in room 412,” he said. “The note was returned to you as inadequate.”

My stomach tightened.

“I reviewed the original note. It was not thin. It was thorough, correctly reasoned, and demonstrated the kind of integrative clinical thinking we spend years trying to build. It was marked up because of a word choice on the third line that differed from how the attending would have phrased it. Not clinically. Stylistically.”

For a moment the room seemed to go extremely quiet around that sentence.

I had rewritten that note four times.

I had lain awake until two in the morning because of a stylistic preference.

Dr. Caulfield set the folder aside.

“I’m not here to adjudicate a grievance,” he said. “That is not the purpose of this meeting. Dr. Okafor and I have been discussing structural questions about this program, and those discussions are ongoing. But I wanted to speak with you directly because I watched how you were treated, and I watched what you did with it.”

I realized then that my hands were clasped in my lap so tightly the tendons in my wrists were visible.

“You didn’t get smaller,” he said. “You got more careful. There’s a meaningful difference.”

The sentence hit harder than praise would have.

Because the truth was I had gotten smaller, in increments. In the daily, invisible ways fear does its work. I had second-guessed simple judgments. Hesitated before writing assessments I knew were correct. Lost sleep over phrasing. Started hearing Dr. Harmon’s voice in my own mind before I even finished a note.

And yet I had also worked harder. Looked deeper. Followed up. Written things down. Stayed with questions until I understood them. Both things were true.

“The cafeteria,” I said, because suddenly I needed the record corrected somehow. “I wasn’t trying to make a statement. I wasn’t thinking about anything. I just didn’t want to watch someone’s oatmeal get taken away.”

He nodded once.

“I know,” he said. “That’s why it mattered.”

Dr. Okafor spoke then for the first time since I’d sat down.

“We are not asking you to do anything today,” she said. “Dr. Caulfield wanted to meet with a small number of residents personally as part of the assessment. You are one of four.”

One of four.

That detail unsettled me more than if I had been the only one. Because if four of us had stood out to him, then the pattern was not in my head. It was structural. Observable. Significant enough to name.

Dr. Caulfield leaned forward slightly.

“I want to say one more thing, Dr. Mitchell. The way you were treated this month is not the standard we intend to hold here. Changes are coming to how this program is structured and to certain supervisory arrangements. Those decisions have already been made.”

He paused long enough to ensure I was listening with my whole mind.

“You did not cause those decisions. You do not need to carry them. But you should know they are coming, and you should know why.”

I walked out of Dr. Okafor’s office at 8:03 a.m., stood in the hallway for maybe ten seconds, and then kept walking because I had rounds in eleven minutes and three patients whose morning labs I had not yet checked.

That was the thing about residency. Revelation did not excuse you from the day. You could learn that your whole month had just been observed by a man deciding the cultural future of one of the largest hospital systems in Texas, and then still have to log into the EMR and verify a potassium before anyone hurt a patient.

My co-resident found me in the workroom at 8:15, same as most mornings. He set a coffee beside my keyboard without asking. I told him about the meeting in fragments, because that was the only way I could make it sound even remotely real.

When I finished, he blinked twice and said, “The oatmeal.”

“Yes.”

“You paid seven dollars for a stranger’s oatmeal.”

“Yes.”

“And he turns out to be the person deciding the future of this program.”

“That is an accurate summary.”

He sat back in his chair and stared at the ceiling for a moment.

Then he said, very quietly, “I want to believe I would have paid for the oatmeal.”

“You would have.”

He looked at me. “I’m honestly not sure. I was in that cafeteria at 6:15 most of last month. I was usually looking at my phone.”

That stayed with me more than anything else he said.

Because I had also looked at my phone most mornings. I had not arrived that day intending to be the kind of person who notices embarrassment in strangers and intervenes with grace. I had arrived tired, self-absorbed, and one pointed comment away from crying in a supply closet. There had been nothing noble about me.

The man’s ears had turned red. That was what got me.

Maybe that is the honest version of how decency works. Not as virtue in its grand form, but as a small resistance to the moment when you realize you can walk away and don’t.

Rounds that morning were different, though not dramatically. Dr. Harmon ran them the way he always did—same clipped cadence, same weaponized silences, same ability to find the one unsecured edge in a resident’s preparation and press there. But something had shifted for me.

I stood in the hallway outside room 408, answered his questions, missed one dosing detail, and when the silence came I felt it for what it was: not authority, not truth, just one man’s method.

“I’ll look that up and document the correct dose in the note within the hour,” I said.

He nodded and moved on.

And for the first time in weeks, I did not feel afraid. I felt like a doctor doing a hard job inside a flawed system. Which is a much more workable thing to be.

Over the next three weeks, whispers moved through the program in the way institutional change always begins—without names, without official language, just enough irregularity to make the observant sit up. Dr. Harmon was absent from two teaching sessions he normally dominated. A faculty meeting ran long behind closed doors. One of the senior fellows came out of an administrator’s office looking like he had seen both disaster and overdue justice at once.

Then the email arrived.

It went to the entire department and was written in the careful neutral language all large American institutions use when trying to announce a correction without admitting a wound. Revised supervision structure. Updated observation protocols. New guidelines for resident feedback. Creation of a resident support and training quality committee reporting directly to the incoming chief medical officer.

Anyone paying attention could read between the lines.

Anyone who had trained under Dr. Harmon could read them in the dark.

Dr. Caulfield’s appointment as chief medical officer was announced the following Wednesday.

I was in the workroom when the notification hit the hospital intranet. His official photograph was only slightly more formal than the image in my mind: steady eyes, composed expression, the posture of someone who had spent enough years in institutions to recognize where the soul leaks out of them.

The biography listed Johns Hopkins, medical education reform, national consulting, three decades of leadership. It did not mention oatmeal.

By then I was on a different rotation with a different attending, Dr. Vasquez, who ran rounds like collaborative thought instead of public sentencing. She said “I don’t know” when she didn’t know. She asked residents not only what they thought, but why they thought it. Then she actually listened to the answer. Under her, the same hospital felt structurally different. Not easy. Never easy. Just sane.

I still kept the notebook.

At first I thought it was because fear had trained the habit into me. But eventually I realized the notebook had become useful for reasons unrelated to survival. Writing down what I didn’t know made me better. Following questions to their end made me better. Staying curious instead of defensive made me better. The method outlived the damage that produced it.

That may be true of more things than medicine.

On the last morning of December, I ran into Dr. Caulfield in the cafeteria.

Same second-floor entrance. Same corner of the line. Same bowl of oatmeal. Same cup of coffee.

This time he paid with a card that worked just fine.

He saw me, nodded, and said, “Good morning, Dr. Mitchell.”

It was the first time anyone had used my title that month without making it feel like a test.

I got my coffee and sat at my usual corner table. For a few minutes the cafeteria was exactly what it always was at 6:15 a.m.—half empty, overlit, smelling like burnt coffee and eggs that had given up. Beyond the window, downtown Houston was still only partially awake. Somewhere overhead a chopper passed toward the Medical Center. The woman at the register was restocking stir sticks as if nothing important had ever happened there.

I thought about what Dr. Caulfield had said in Dr. Okafor’s office: You didn’t get smaller. You got more careful.

I still wasn’t entirely sure that was true. I think there were mornings in November when I had shrunk in real ways—small daily collapses of confidence so incremental I could only recognize them in retrospect. That notebook had been part evidence of that: page after page of things I was afraid not to know.

But I also thought about the week before, when I found a new intern sitting in her car in the parking garage at seven in the morning with the windows fogged and both hands gripping the steering wheel.

I knocked on the glass.

She startled, rolled the window down halfway, and said she was fine in the exact tone people use when they are very much not fine.

“I’ve been not fine in a parked car at seven a.m. before,” I told her. “You can still come upstairs anyway.”

She laughed, surprised enough to be briefly honest, and then she did come upstairs. I walked her to the elevator. Showed her the shortcut to the second-floor workroom that saves four minutes and matters more than it should when you have six patients and rounds at 7:30. Told her where the good coffee was and which supply closet always had extra alcohol swabs because no one ever checked the second bin.

Small things.

But small things are how a culture either hardens or heals. They always add up in one direction or another.

That may have been the real point of the oatmeal. Not that kindness gets rewarded by power, though it makes a cleaner story when it does. The point was that someone was watching how the place actually worked when no one believed they were being evaluated. Who noticed. Who ignored. Who humiliated. Who explained. Who made fear look like rigor. Who made room for people to learn.

Years later, if someone asked me when I first began to understand what kind of physician I wanted to become, I would not say it was in anatomy lab or on my first ICU rotation or the night I placed my first central line successfully. I would say it was in a cafeteria on the second floor of a hospital in Houston, at 6:15 in the morning, when I was too tired to construct a reason not to help somebody.

Because medicine teaches you a great many things that are not in textbooks.

It teaches you how quickly knowledge turns arrogant when it is separated from humility. How often institutions confuse endurance with excellence. How tempting it is to pass pain downward simply because it was once passed to you and survived. How easy it is to hide behind standards when what you are really preserving is habit.

But it also teaches you other things, if you let it.

That a doctor can be rigorous without being cruel.

That attention is a form of care.

That someone always learns from the atmosphere you create, even when you believe you are only talking to one person.

That the version of yourself who shows up when nobody is keeping score is usually the truest one you have.

And maybe most of all, it teaches you that people are revealed in the smallest moments. In hallways. In workrooms. In elevators. In morning sign-out. In a parked car before dawn. In the silence after someone gets a question wrong. In a cafeteria line when a stranger is about to have his oatmeal taken away.

You find out who people are there.

Whether you mean to or not.

I wasn’t looking to be seen that morning. I certainly wasn’t looking to change anything larger than the next ten minutes of my own day. I had coffee on my mind, rounds in my future, and a running internal monologue that was not particularly flattering to anyone, including myself.

And still, that moment found its way into a room weeks later where decisions were being made about the shape of an entire program.

That is the part I carry now.

Not the surprise of the suit, though I will admit that reveal still satisfies some private dramatic instinct in me. Not even the vindication about the note, though there are nights I still think about the phrase stylistic choice and feel something old inside me unclench.

What stays with me is simpler.

A resident on too little sleep saw a man being quietly embarrassed over seven dollars and decided, for no grand reason at all, that she didn’t want to watch it happen.

That turned out to matter.

I finished my coffee, threw away the cup, and went upstairs to review morning labs.

The day started the way all hospital days start—too fast, too full, too many variables already moving before your mind has caught up. Six notes to update. A sodium trending the wrong way. A family wanting answers no one could yet honestly give. A paging nurse. An intern unsure about a discharge summary. The resident workroom filling, emptying, refilling like a lung.

Normal.

Which is to say relentless.

But something in me had settled by then. Not confidence exactly. Confidence in residency is often just another word for insufficient data. Something steadier. A sense that medicine was still hard, still humbling, still often terrifying, but no longer organized entirely around fear in my own head.

I checked the labs. Answered pages. Went to rounds.

When the new intern on our team hesitated outside a patient’s room because she wasn’t sure if her assessment was ready enough to say out loud, I glanced at her notebook, recognized the look in her eyes, and said quietly, “You know more than you think. Start with the lungs.”

She did.

She was right.

We kept moving.

That’s the other thing no one tells you when you start: most of being a doctor is not made of grand triumphs. It is made of accumulations. A careful sentence in a note. A correction given with dignity instead of theater. A coffee set down beside someone’s keyboard without explanation. A hallway question answered without making the asker feel smaller for asking. An attending who says why instead of simply wrong. A resident who remembers exactly what it felt like to be new and acts accordingly.

Small things.

But small things decide what kind of place people are training in. And what kind of people they become when they leave it.

I did not pay for the oatmeal because I was trying to be admirable.

I paid for it because I was too tired to watch something mean happen and pretend I hadn’t noticed.

If that is all decency is some mornings, it turns out that is still enough.