A scar is not a wound.

A wound is damage; a scar is the body’s evidence that the damage was survived, the specific tissue that healing lays down over what tried to kill you.

Every mark on my skin was a small monument to the fact that I had not died in that kitchen, that I had lived, that I was standing in a court of law telling the truth while the man who burned me went pale at the sight of my survival.

I did not hide them for him one more second.

I opened my jacket, and I let the whole room see exactly how much I had lived through, and I watched him understand that the very thing he’d meant as my erasure had become the most eloquent testimony against him.

Chapter 18 — The Recording