I did not hate that woman in my bathroom.

Hatred would have required me to take her seriously, to grant her enough reality to be worth hating.

What I felt was smaller and worse than hatred: a kind of blindness.

I had looked at her and failed to see a person there at all — someone with a history, a mother, a name she’d lost, a heart that could still be broken by a stranger’s contempt.

I saw a mess.