Weston would sit across from me holding a report I could barely read and translate it into a verdict: my body, my flaw, my deficiency.
He was so gentle about it.
That was the genius of it.
He never raised his voice.
He’d take my hand and tell me it wasn’t my fault, in exactly the tone that made certain I understood it was.
By the fourth year I had stopped feeling like a person and started feeling like a machine that didn’t work.
I looked at pregnant strangers with an envy so sharp it frightened me.
I flinched at baby showers.
I had absorbed, all the way down to the marrow, a single sentence about myself — I am the reason — and I had no idea, none, that the sentence had been written for me by someone else, and handed to me to carry, so that I’d be too busy carrying it to notice what he was stealing with his other hand.
Chapter 5 — Three Days After