And I want to say something about that version of me, because it matters, and because I think a great many people carry a version like her, folded away, unseen even by themselves.

She was not a new person, invented in that fountain.

She had been there all along — the steady, formidable, unbreakable woman who said remember this moment to a man who had terrified her for thirty-two years.

She had simply never been allowed out, because the family I grew up in had no room for her, and a self that is given no room to exist learns, out of a kind of survival instinct, to stay hidden.

In the Sterling household there was exactly one acceptable version of me: the small one, the apologetic one, the one who agreed she was less.