I had made a virtue of my abandonment.

I had called it independence and worn it like armor.

And now a woman with my own impossible eyes was touching my face and telling me she had never stopped looking, not for one single day — that somewhere out in the world, the whole time I was learning that no one was coming, someone had been coming, had been coming for twenty-eight years, had never once stopped coming.

The foundation of my life did not crack.

It simply dissolved, and I was left standing on nothing, holding a truth too large to fit inside the shape I had made of myself.

I flinched from her hand not because the tenderness frightened me, though it did, but because some part of me understood that if I let myself feel it, the person I had spent twenty-eight years becoming — the island, the girl who needed no one — would not survive the contact.