At different times, they went upstairs, retrieved snacks, more pillows, an additional blanket, the heating pad. I was never alone. I was fed caramel popcorn, orange juice. Wallis brought me my contact case, my solution. On Cricket read, for hours; eventually her voice became white noise, and I was able to rest.

Their efforts had not been in vain. Though I still wasn’t myself, I did feel fortified enough to put on makeup and tackle my to-do list. And this tour I could also manage.

On the tram over to the Capitol Visitor Center, it felt as though I was walking through a storm. Not a particularly violent one, but that of an insistent, cleansing rain. Everyone I knew, and many people I didn’t, greeted me like we were already midconversation. What a wild story, they said. I sensed some of them wanted me to exhibit shame. Others, it seemed, were expecting me to chat as candidly as I had to Atlas and to Monica, deconstructing, reviewing, retelling, even joking. I was aware I was still a spectacle, but the trauma I might have felt months ago never surfaced. Whatever they thought about me, finally, was not the same as what I thought about myself.

I walked the interns through the Old Senate and Supreme Court Chambers, then the Senate gallery, where the majority leader was getting ready to make a unanimous consent request to recess. The interns, savvy and prepared for their school credit, didn’t need me to explain what that was. “You give me hope,” I told them.

I ended their tour in the Rotunda, at the foot of suffragettes Mott, Anthony, Stanton, carved in towering white marble. “They unveiled this statue six months after the ratification of the nineteenth amendment,” I said. “Then, the very next day, it was moved to the basement, where it lived in storage with brooms and mops.” This fact, when delivered, produced horrified expressions from my new friends. “It wasn’t until 1997 that it was finally brought back here, to its rightful place. An original inscription,” I continued, “reads, ‘Woman first denied a soul, then called mindless, now arisen, declaring herself an entity to be reckoned.’”

“Where is this inscription?” one asked. “Where are you looking?”

“It was taken off,” I said. “The same day the statue was moved to the basement. And never replaced.”

For many minutes, I let them discuss how they could organize—perhaps with other interns—to get the inscription reinstated. “You give me hope,” I said yet again. Our conversation carried on, we talked about glass ceilings, men who constantly interrupted, icons Fannie Lou Hamer and Shirley Chisholm, who refused to be silent, who battled while dancing backward in heels.

Their lunch break over, they departed, chatting about their favorite anecdote from the tour: the one about the senator who beat his colleague to unconsciousness on the floor of the chamber with his metal-topped cane.