Edith’s back stayed scarred; no treatment on earth could undo what the fire had done.

But the hiding was over.

A year on, Natalie brought a framed photograph — Edith in the sunlit garden, ringed by Natalie and Veronica and Colton and me, all of us squinting and grinning under a summer sky — and on the back she had written, Some people carry their wounds as a secret shame, when those wounds are only proof of how fiercely they loved the world. We hung it by Edith’s bed.

And that night, an aide told me later, Edith Ledbetter did a thing she had not done since she was thirty-six years old.

She turned off her lamp, and she lay down in her bed, and she lay all the way back — flat on her scarred back, in the dark, with no one watching and no need for anyone to.

The fire had taken her skin in ten seconds.

The fear had taken forty years to let go of her.

And in the end all it took to break its grip was one person, and then another, who looked at what she’d been hiding and refused to look away.

THE END.