I DROP MY phone in the pocket of my robe, leave the mirror and move around the Princess Suite, tidying up. Plastic wrappings from coffee cups, the flip-flops I kicked off in different directions when I returned from the pool. I’ll need the room neat and clean when I come back post-procedure. If I come back.

I’m gathering wet towels to pile by the door when light glints against the edge of my vision, refracted from the window’s glass. I go to it. In the distant sky, a firework show has started. I watch for a moment. Explosions blossom like flowers on a nature show, fast forwarded from buds to full blooms. I rush to the bed, fish my phone from the messed-up sheets, take video I’ll never watch. Certainly, I’ll never post. Instagram is an app for bots and grandmas, now. It’s been six years since I shared anything. Not that I don’t want to. It’s what I know @annawrey can’t give me, after all this time.

The grand finale makes the sky a bouquet. It wilts into the dark. I open Instagram, fall belly down on the bed. I’m signed into a fake account and rather than log onto @annawrey, I search her as I would anyone I followed once, liked, then ghosted. She loads slow and outdated, a museum of my past selves, every image the remains of a girl, frozen in time, waiting for me to return and rescue her. There she is, high ponytail and puppy filter, riding shotgun in Jake’s Land Rover. Vegas baby, she sing-songs. I watch her cut off and repeat, persistent as the lost, calling to be found.

AS A GIRL, I wanted to be discovered. Fifteen years later, as a thirty-five-year-old woman, I want to undo the past and disappear. And yet that reporter has found me. I could make a difference to other women, she writes, every time she DMs @annawrey asking for my story, my experience with Jake. She says a name like mine could help gather other names. “But the choice is only ever yours,” she adds. As if she has to. Choice is a power I am well aware is mine to wield. A feminist, post-feminist right. To give my story, or keep it to myself, keep myself hidden and safe. My choice to surgically alter my body, impregnate my body, stay natural, stay alive, stop living.