When I was raped I lost my virginity and almost lost my life. I also discarded certain assumptions I had held about how the world worked and about how safe I was.

If I shut my eyes, I believed, I would disappear. To make it through, I had to be present the whole time.

I wake up very early in the morning. I like to start in the dark, and I never work at night, because my brain is evaporated by 4 p.m.

But she was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything. At seventy she had come to believe in time alone. ~pg 254

It was Buckley, as my father and sister joined the group and listened to Grandma Lynn’s countless toasts, who saw me. He saw me standing under the rustic colonial clock and stared. He was drinking champagne. There were strings coming out from all around me, reaching out, waving in the air. Someone passed him a brownie. He held it in his hand but did not eat. He saw my shape and face, which had not changed-the hair still parted down the middle, the chest still flat and hips undeveloped-and wanted to call out my name. It was only a moment, and then I was gone.

Please don't let Daddy die Susie," he whispered. "I need him.

The damage can fester under layers of time and change, and an ignorant, thoughtless remark can easily reopen the wound.