She locked the bathroom door, the tiny click far too anemic to reach the bedroom, where Joe lay reading. In a cupboard beneath the sink, in a makeup bag where she stored a collection of old compacts and lipsticks, Lila fished out a small tube of cream. Another little secret she kept from Joe.

Lifting the sleeve of her T-shirt to expose the top of her left arm, she moved a finger across her scars, seven thin lines that ran parallel to one another, the Braille that told the story of that summer when she was eighteen—the summer of her attack. Each scar was as straight as a toothpick except for the one in the middle, the first one. She had been crying when she made that cut, her hand trembling enough to give the scar a slight dip. When she confessed to Dr. Roberts that the flaw upset her more than the cut itself, he had seemed to understand.

Lila pressed a smidgen of scar-reduction cream onto her finger and began rubbing it on her arm, counting down the strokes. Ten, nine, eight…The advertisement promised dramatic results, but after a week Lila had seen very little change. Then again, her scars had had years to dig in, so she saw no reason to expect them to disappear overnight.

Lila wanted to believe that she’d come a long way in the eight years since she stopped seeing Dr. Roberts, but she worried her progress was more a matter of time and distance than actual healing. The trauma to her flesh had mended easily enough, her scars the only reminder of who she had once been. But the other wounds, the ones that she could only see when she closed her eyes—they refused to heal. She had hoped to drive them inward far enough that they would never escape. But escape they sometimes did.

Four, three, two, one. She finished working the cream across her arm and put the tube back into the old makeup bag, before returning the kit to its hiding place. She had become adept at hiding things from Joe, and she felt a tinge of dishonesty for trying to get rid of her scars. How many times had she told herself—told Joe—that she was okay with them? The cutting had helped her survive, had given voice to the emotion that roiled through her veins.

Back in that terrible summer, it felt as though her anger lay trapped beneath her skin, a caged animal, its scream growing so loud in her ears that the only way to find peace was to touch a razor to her flesh. But those seven scars, souvenirs brought back from a walk through hell, were now no more meaningful than cracks in a dried lake bed. Apply a little skin cream and soon they would be gone.

When she worked the cream over her arm the first time, a week earlier, she contemplated telling Joe about it. Why not? He knew about her past, about the men, the cutting, and the two weeks she spent in the psych ward, so why not tell him about her little experiment in scar reduction? He had stayed with her through every new revelation as she eased him into the nightmare of her past, which sometimes made her question his judgment.