THE LIABILITY CLAUSE
She had never, in sixteen years of writing other people's confessions for them, written one of her own, and she discovered, at four in the morning, alone at a desk she almost never used, that the muscles for it did not exist yet, that she was building them from nothing, one true sentence at a time, the way a person learns to walk again after an injury has taken the walking away.
She wrote for two hours. She did not stop to edit. She let it come out ugly and repetitive and sometimes contradictory, because that was, she understood now, the actual difference between a confession and a strategy: a strategy could not afford to be any