For thirty-six years I had made myself small in rooms like this one — had stood at the edges of my family’s gatherings in the wrong clothes, apologizing with my whole posture for taking up space, waiting to be noticed and dreading being noticed in equal measure.

I had spent my life in the shadows at the back of the ballroom, and I had come to believe, somewhere deep and unexamined, that the shadows were where I belonged.

And now I was walking into the brightest light in the building, in a suit that fit, toward a microphone, in front of two hundred of the people whose approval my parents had traded me away to win.

The clicking of my own shoes on that stage was the most powerful sound I had ever heard, because it was the sound of a woman who had stopped waiting to be invited.

No one had given me that stage.

No one had cleared a path or called my name or saved me a seat.