After telling the hard facts to anyone from lover to friend, I have changed in their eyes. Often it is awe or admiration, sometimes it is repulsion, once or twice it has been fury hurled directly at me for reasons I remain unsure of.

but, he also said it because part of him wanted more of her, this cold woman who was not exactly cold, this rock who was not stone.

I forgive you," I said. I said what I had to. I would die by pieces to save myself from real death.

These things, she felt, were not to be passed around like disingenuous party favors. She kept an honor code with her journals and her poems. 'Inside, inside,' she would whisper quietly to herself when she felt the urge to tell.

I was like I was in science class: I was curious.

As she stood in the darkened room and watched my sister and father, I knew one of things that heaven meant. I had a choice, and it was not to divide my family in my heart.

She was unaware that she was somewhat of a celebrity up in heaven. I had told people about her, what she did, how she observed moments of silence up and down the city and wrote small individual prayers in her journal, and the story had travelled so quickly that women lined up to know she had found where they’d been killed. She had fans in heaven..... Meanwhile, for us, she was doing important work, work that most people on Earth were too frightened even too contemplate.