She looked at the exact same scar, the identical stretch of thick scarred skin, and she performed a complete inversion of its meaning.

She did not see what the fire had taken.

She saw what the fire had given — saw, in that ruined-looking back, not subtraction but the most enormous addition imaginable, an entire human life, her own, and her daughter’s, and every day either of them had ever lived or would live.

The scar had not ruined a beauty.

The scar was the reason a beautiful thing existed at all.

And when Natalie said it — I see forty years of my life — she did not just comfort Edith.