In forty years.

I don’t entirely know why it’s you.

I think it’s because you never once asked me to show you.” And then, in the gray light of that rainy morning, Edith Ledbetter told me how she’d gotten the scar.

But before she did, she said one more thing about the hiding that I have never forgotten, because it explained something to me about all the guarded people I have known since, my own self included.

“The strange part,” she said, “is that the hiding stopped being about the scar a long time ago.