I still carry the child I was. She still startles at certain tones of voice. She still notices family photographs in other people’s homes with a sensitivity that feels almost cellular. She still sometimes mistrusts gentleness when it appears too easily. But she also now lives in a body that knows how to protect her. A life that can house her. A future built by hands no one steadied but my own.
And if that child occasionally presses her nose to the glass of memory and wonders what it might have been like to be chosen early, chosen openly, chosen without condition, I no longer shush her.
I simply open the door and let her walk through the rooms we made.
The city still glitters outside my windows. Deals still rise and collapse. Men still underestimate women in conference rooms and later revise their language when numbers embarrass them. Society still throws galas. Old money still mistakes itself for old virtue. Somewhere, Constance Whitmore is probably arranging flowers or guest lists or strategic silences and feeling, from time to time, the old sting of being unmade by someone she had classified as lesser.