It seemed only right that it should go on being a place where care waited for people who needed it.

The women who come to Emil’s Room have scars like mine, most of them, from fires and accidents and, for some of them, from people who were supposed to love them.

Adaptive design is a real and practical thing — clothing that opens the way my court jacket opened, that accommodates a body that has been changed, that lets a person dress herself with dignity when the old ways of dressing have become painful or impossible.

But that is not really what the room is for, any more than my silence in the hospital was really about being quiet.

The room is for the moment a woman who has been hiding one side of her face for a year looks up from her fabric and forgets to hide it.

It is for the laughter, which I did not expect and which undoes me every time — the sound of women who have survived the worst thing that ever happened to them discovering that they are still, somehow, funny, still themselves, still capable of arguing over the good scissors.