I had spent so many years organizing myself around other people’s wants that the muscle you use to know your own had gone soft from disuse.

I had become fluent in everyone’s preferences but my own.

That was the moment the accusation stopped being the wound and became, strangely, the thing that lanced a much older one.

Because I understood, sitting there, that Matthias’s belief that a birthmark outweighed my whole character was not some sudden aberration.

It was the logical endpoint of a marriage in which I had made myself smaller and smaller and quieter and quieter, until I had trained him, patiently, over nine years, to weigh me at almost nothing.

I had helped build the very scale on which he’d found me wanting.