Barrett’s smile did not fade so much as fall off his face.

Putting the suit on that morning had done something to me that I had not expected.

It had hung at the back of the closet for five years, behind the soft, shapeless clothes of the life I had shrunk into — the leggings, the cardigans, the wardrobe of a woman who no longer went anywhere that required armor.

I had almost given it away twice.

And when I took it out and put it on in the gray light before dawn, and it still fit, and I looked in the mirror and saw not the tired allowance-keeper of the last five years but the woman who had existed before her, I understood something about what Barrett had actually taken from me.