In the beginning, yes, it was the scar — I didn’t want people to see the mess the fire made of me.

But somewhere along the way the thing I was hiding became the hiding itself.

Do you understand?

After enough years, the secret wasn’t the back anymore.

The secret was that I was a woman who had a secret.

That I had built my whole life, my whole marriage, around a locked door.

And that was the thing I really couldn’t bear to have seen — not the scar, but the enormous, exhausting, forty-year architecture of concealment I’d raised around it.

Because to show my back to Robert, in year thirty, wouldn’t have just meant showing him the fire.