Julian had used the word standing as a weapon, a mockery, a way of telling me that my suffering was beneath his notice, that my pregnant body’s need for rest was a joke, that I existed to endure whatever he assigned me.

Keep standing, he had said, and laughed.

And I wanted to take that exact word and hand it back to him transformed, to show him what standing had actually come to mean.

Because there are two ways to stand.

There is the standing he had ordered, the standing of the powerless, the exhausted, the humiliated, forced upright in the cold by someone else’s cruelty.

And there is the other kind, the standing of a person who has found her own feet at last, who is upright not because she has been forced to be but because she has chosen to be, who stands on her own strength and her own dignity and needs no one’s permission to do it.