I wore the green dress.
The one from the gala, from the first dinner, from every significant evening that had required me to look like I had already won before the doing of it. Sera had called it my armour. I had told her that was a dramatic interpretation. She had pointed out that I wore it specifically when something important was happening.
She was right. Obviously.
I stood in the east tower room — our room, with the door frame marks and the cliff view and the flowers somebody kept putting on the table — and I looked at myself in the mirror and thought: *there you are.*
Not the version that had arrived at eighteen to be placed.
Not the version that had fled with one bag and three years of rage.
The version that had built something and survived something and chosen something.
Dr.
