For a while it enraged me — the idea that his lie had left a permanent mark in the very place he’d falsely claimed was broken, that he had, in trying to fake my defect, actually created a real one.

But somewhere in those months I stopped letting the scar belong to him.

It was mine now.

It was proof, written in my own body, of what had been done and survived.

And the team of specialists watching over those two heartbeats was not evidence that I was fragile; it was evidence that I was surrounded, at last, by people whose entire purpose was to protect rather than to blame.

I had spent six years with a man who manufactured my weakness.