A year after the handcuffs, I stood on the rooftop terrace of the Larissa Hollis Women’s Health Center.
I’d built it with the money they were forced to return — the foundation funds, the frozen shares, every dollar dragged back into the light — and I’d dedicated it to the two kinds of women I understood better than anyone: those facing fertility misinformation, and those facing financial abuse dressed up as love.
When a woman walks through those doors convinced her body is the failure, someone sits with her and reads her the truth in plain language, the way Xavier once read it to me.
When a woman suspects the person handling her money is quietly rewriting her life, someone helps her look.
It is not a monument to what was done to me.
It is the opposite — it is the thing I wish had existed when I needed it, made real so the next woman won’t have to spend a year on a bakery floor learning to trust her own hands again.
A woman came in during our first month who I will never forget, because she was me.
She sat across a desk with her shoulders curled inward and told our counselor, in the small flat voice I recognized from my own mouth, that her body was the problem, that her husband had been so patient about it, that she just wanted to understand what was wrong with her.
And I watched our counselor do the thing no one had done for me in four years — set the actual records on the table and read them out, plainly, kindly, until the woman went very still.
I don’t know how that story ended.