What they had not understood, because people like them never do, is that most of what they tore away was the costume, not the woman.

When it was gone, the woman was still there.

She was, in fact, more visible than she had been in a decade.

I looked at her in that mirror — bare-scalped, sharp-boned, calm — and I did not mourn.

I recognized her. There you are, I thought. I wondered where you’d gone.

Chapter 13 — The Crown