I learned to trust the cold clarity that had saved me in that hospital bed and to stop apologizing for it.

I learned that the softness they had exploited was not gone — I could still be kind, still be warm with the people who earned it, still cry at the right things — but that it now had a spine underneath it, a hard floor of self-respect that had not been there before, and below which I would not sink again for anyone.

The woman at the window of that corner office was not the woman who had walked into that Sunday dinner with a briefcase full of questions.

She was harder, and clearer, and better.

They had tried to break me, and they had instead done the one thing no one had managed in thirty-odd years of my careful, accommodating life: they had forced me to become entirely myself.

Chapter 36 — The Letter