There was one more thing I wanted, and I want to be honest that it was not strictly necessary.

It was a statement, and I needed to make it.

I went to a jeweler and commissioned a headpiece — not a tiara, but something colder and cleaner: a narrow band of polished surgical steel, its upper edge cut into the same sharp, uneven angles as the hair that had been hacked from my head.

It was not pretty.

It was not meant to be.

It was meant to say, to anyone who looked at me and remembered that ballroom, a single sentence: I wear what you did to me as armor now, and it did not break me — it sharpened me. When it was finished I put it on over the platinum of my shaved head, and I looked in the mirror, and I did not see a victim.