What they had done to shame me, I had finished on my own terms, and in doing so I had taken the last thing they could use against me and turned it into the first thing that was wholly mine.

The stylist’s hands shook as she worked; mine did not.

She kept glancing at me in the mirror the way you’d watch someone standing too close to a ledge, waiting for the grief to break through, and I understood her worry and could not share it.

Because what she read as damage, I experienced as subtraction, and there is a kind of subtraction that leaves you lighter.

For ten years I had maintained a self designed for someone else’s comfort — the length of my hair, the softness of my voice, the smallness I performed at his dinners so his guests would find me pleasant and unthreatening.

Sena and Marius had reached in and torn a piece of that self away in front of a thousand people, meaning it as annihilation.