What mattered was that she was standing on a beach in the morning sun, grown, alive, asking a question that only someone who had survived something could ask.

She was not asking about vanity.

She was asking whether the mark of the worst thing that ever happened to her would always be there, whether she would carry it into every summer and every mirror for the rest of her life, and whether that was a thing to grieve.

I understood the question completely, because I had asked it myself, once, of a physical therapist who had no answer, in the months when the scar was still red and angry and I could not lift my arm above my shoulder.

“No,” I said.

“It reminds me that someone tried to end my story.”