It was absolute on the kitchen floor.

The recognition, when it comes, is only the world catching up to something that was always already true.

Ferdinand had needed diamonds and a fund and a ballroom full of powerful people before he could see me.

The women in that house would not have diamonds or funds.

What I wanted them to have instead was the plaque, and the thing it said, and the knowledge — earned in the hardest possible way, by a woman who had believed the opposite for eight years — that no one, ever, gets to be the judge of whether you are worth something.

You simply are.

Even on the floor.

Especially on the floor.

THE END.