I took what she had ruined and made it deliberate — sharp, styled, chosen — so that the very thing meant to mark me as a victim became, instead, the most striking thing in the room.

Every person at that table knew what had happened to my hair; it had been in the incident report, in the whispers, in the reason they were all gathered.

And here I walked in wearing it not as a wound but as a statement, transformed from the evidence of my humiliation into the emblem of my refusal to be humiliated.

I saw Conrad register it.

He had last seen me weeping-adjacent in a restroom, hacked and bleeding and small.

He had spent the weeks since, I am certain, picturing that woman, drawing confidence from her, telling himself that whatever legal noise I was making, the real me was still the broken thing in the mirror.