It is a strange, small wound, to have your body taught that a cup of tea might be an attack — a wound in a place most people never think about, the ordinary trust that lets you accept a drink from a hand that loves you.

Ottoline had taken that from me along with everything else, and getting it back was slower than my liver’s healing, slower than the fading of the marks on my skin.

But it came back.

It came back in this new kitchen, at this counter over the water, one homemade cup at a time, until the morning I realized I had drunk my tea without once thinking of her — and understood that this, too, was a thing I had won back.

Not just my health.

Not just my life.