It was February 2005, one of those bone-deep cold days when the wind slices through your coat. I was on a Brooklyn street corner waiting – again – for my “little sister,” Kitty. We had been paired for about a year through a mentorship program that encouraged twice-monthly meetups, but ours rarely stayed on schedule. Kitty – short for Katia – was fourteen: curious, introspective, perceptive. But her home life was chaotic, and she was hard to pin down.

When she finally appeared from beneath the elevated subway tracks, relief washed over me, until I saw what she was wearing: a thin shirt and no coat. In twenty-degree weather.

“Why aren’t you wearing a coat?”

Over twenty years, a mentorship grew into something more.