And the surest sign of what those two years had done to me was not the yogurt stain or the bruised eyes; it was that I had stopped.

Somewhere in the exhaustion I had quietly agreed to disappear — decided I was not worth the thirty seconds it took to feel like myself, that a woman running on no sleep to save a family that mocked her did not get to also be a person.

The lipstick was the first thing to go and it would, it turned out, be the last thing to come back.

When I finally put it on again, in that same hallway, it would not be about my face at all.