He was two years too late to offer me a thing I had long since made for myself.

Chapter 19 — Proof of Survival

I will not pretend the rebuilding was clean, or that walking out at three in the morning made me instantly whole.

It did not.

The body and the mind keep their own ledgers, and those took much longer to balance than the legal ones.

My cracked ribs healed slowly, over months, in the ordinary way that bones heal.

But the other injuries — the ones that do not show on an X-ray — took longer, and were harder to trace.