The Reed-Hartwell Patient Advocacy Foundation had become the work of my life, and I do not use that phrase loosely.

I had taken the very tools Julian used to isolate and erase me — the manipulated records, the falsified reports, the systemic cutting-off of a woman from the truth of her own life — and I had turned every one of them, one by one, into a shield.

A nationwide shield, held over women who were, at that very moment, being told by someone they trusted that they were broken, on the authority of documents that had been rewritten behind their backs.

Every file we caught was a woman who would not spend three years believing a lie about her own body, the way I had.

I could not go back and give those three years to myself.

But I could stand between that lie and the next woman, and the one after her, for the rest of my life.