It was not forgiveness.

It was something that might, someday, a long way off, become the ground that forgiveness could stand on.

For now it was enough that she could look.

Chapter 20 — We Listen First

Ten months later, the landscape of their lives had changed almost past recognition.

Irene’s kidney function had fully recovered; the follow-up scans were clean, and the pain — the pain she had lived inside for so long that she had stopped being able to remember its absence — was gone.

She had gone back to her art classes, and back to her friends, and somewhere in those ten months she had stopped carrying a heating pad in the bottom of her backpack like a thing she was ashamed of, because she no longer needed it, and because she no longer needed to hide the fact of her own body from the world.