And she would never, not once, have to ask permission to sit at a table her own mother had built with her own two hands.

“The foundation board convenes in twenty minutes,” Tamsin said, glancing at her watch.

“And the press is downstairs for your statement on the launch.”

The launch was the reason for all the cameras.

I had taken the thing that had been done to me — the isolation, the contempt, the calm assumption that a woman in a hospital bed is a woman who can be discarded — and I had turned it into an instrument for other women who had no trust fund and no architecture of their own to stand on.

The Fairchild Women’s Legal Defense Fund would open its doors that afternoon, and every woman who walked through them would have, at her back, the one thing I had nearly forgotten I possessed on the worst night of my life: a lawyer, and a plan, and the knowledge that she was not, in fact, powerless.