“Undo what was done? To find the real you?”

She nodded.

“Do you want to undo it all somehow?”

“I wish it had never been done.”

“But it was. Do you want to go back?”

“I thought I hated it—hated what she made me into.”

“Do you, though?”

Slowly, Linda shook her head. Recalling her conversation with Ted Jeffers, she said, “No, I don’t. It can feel good to have people admire me.”

“That’s natural, Linda.”

“But I’m not natural. I’m a freak show.”

“Linda, things that hurt us leave scars. Those scars change us forever—”

“What if that change was for the better? That means she did the right thing, doesn’t it?”

Dr. Kirkland sat forward. “No—absolutely not. No, completely and utterly no. What she did was wrong. It left you scarred for the rest of your life. You’ve been struggling for decades to recover from all of it. It was wrong.”

Linda realized her hands were shaking. “So how can I like some of it? If it was wrong, how can some of it have turned out good?”

“What turned out good—” Dr. Kirkland left her chair to perch on the little table between them. Taking Linda’s hand and warming it between her own, she said in her quiet, certain voice, “Listen carefully, Linda please. This is so important. Anything good that came out of all that pain is what you did to heal yourself. If there is good, that is your success. She hurt you and you have taken that hurt and transformed it. If you are beautiful, Linda, it’s because you have chosen to be so, not because she chose that for you.”

“I don’t—I don’t like it when people stare. When women want only what they see.” Linda wanted to press her forehead into Dr. K’s hands but instead, she made herself say the rest of the truth. “But I like the power it gives me to control situations.”

Dr. Kirkland squeezed her hands, then let go. “We’ll talk more about that next time. It’s one of the things that I knew sooner or later you’d figure out. That you dislike that your appearance draws people to you but that you then use it to control them as much as you can.”

“I’d much rather fuck a woman than talk to her, you mean? It doesn’t take a lot of effort to get them to say yes.”

“To say yes to the only question you’ll let them ask.”

“It wasn’t that way with Marissa, you know. It was different. I didn’t have to control her.”

As she rose to her feet, Dr. Kirkland said, “Do you plan to get in touch with her again?”

“Not until I’m not screwed up anymore. Not until I can tell her I know who I am. But I don’t even know what I’m supposed to look like. I’m changing so much, all on the inside where she can’t see it. I can’t ask her to go through this with me. This is my work to do.”