She reached back through four decades and rewrote the meaning of the central fact of the old woman’s body.

The skin didn’t change.

Not one cell of it.

But the thing the skin meant changed entirely, in an instant, forever, and I watched forty years of shame come off Edith Ledbetter’s shoulders in that little room like a coat she’d been wearing so long she’d forgotten it could be taken off.

That is what it can do, to be truly seen by the right person.

It cannot heal the body.