It grows back slowly, a little each week, indifferent to whoever tried to take it, and one morning you look up and it is yours again — different, perhaps, styled by your own choosing now rather than hacked away by someone else’s rage, but yours.

The woman in the ivory gown had grown back the way her hair had: slowly, without drama, a little each week, until one day the humiliation was simply gone and something stronger stood in its place.

Blair had meant to erase me.

What she had actually done was clear away the last of the quiet, apologetic, disappearing wife I had let myself become, and leave room for the woman who had been underneath all along — the one my father might have recognized, the one who read the shareholder agreement, the one who could hold a boardroom silent with a single soft laugh.

They had tried to make me less.

They had, instead, uncovered me.