For most of my recovery, my scars had belonged, in some sense, to Lars.

They were his handiwork, the mark he had left on me, and every time I covered them with a scarf or turned the scarred side away from a mirror, I was in a way agreeing that they were shameful, that they were his to have made and mine to hide.

My therapists had spent months, gently, teaching me a different relationship to my own skin.

And standing in that courtroom, I completed the lesson.

When I opened that jacket, I took the scars back.

I was not showing the room what Lars had done; I was showing the room that I was still here, standing, chin up, speaking — that the fire he’d used to erase me had failed, and that the proof of its failure was written right there on the body he thought he had ruined.