She does not owe them a story. Not the officers who measure every bruise like evidence for a case that is not their life, not the neighbors who pause their gossip only long enough to offer casseroles, not the strangers online who crown her a miracle because they will never have to sit in the same room as her silence. Her return exposes their secret appetite: they do not just want her safe; they want her understandable, narratable, consumable. They want to believe their prayers bought an ending.
But survival is not an ending. It is a beginning she gets to author, or refuse to share. Healing demands that they turn away from the glow of speculation and toward the harder work of restraint. It asks them to defend her right to be unfinished, contradictory, opaque. Whether she becomes a person again, rather than a parable, depends on whether they can bear not knowing.
