I could feel the itch of it.

Everything I had built on top of that year — the decades of walking it off, of deciding my limp was simply mine, of not being the kind of person who dwells — went thin and transparent, and there underneath it was the seventeen-year-old who had trusted the man of the house to tell her the truth about her own life.

That was the year a delivery truck came around the corner too fast outside the grocery store and put me in a cast for nine weeks.

For months after, I walked with a limp.