Everyone.

I’ve watched it happen for forty years — the flinch, the pity, the little sick look they try to hide.” I rinsed the sponge in the warm water and wrung it out.

“Then I won’t look at you the way everyone else does,” I said.

And I stepped up behind her, and I laid the warm sponge against the scarred skin of her back, as gently as I have ever done anything in my life.

She flinched — her whole body jerked at the contact, forty years of instinct firing at once, a body that had trained itself for four decades to never, under any circumstances, permit this.