It was of a piece with everything else, with the night editing and the sold bracelet and the unread papers: a series of small self-erasures, each one reasonable, that added up to a woman living inside someone else’s name and someone else’s life.

And so taking my name back was not merely administrative.

It was a reclamation as deep as any deed or trust.

Sterling was my aunt’s name, and my mother’s, and mine before I ever met Luca.

It was the name of the woman I had been before I began disappearing, and it was the name of the family that had, in the end, reached across death to save me.

Becoming Jessi Sterling again was not just shedding Luca.