"How can you tell?" she asked.
This body has carried a child, she reminded herself. This body has walked through fire and grief. This body is not an apology.
After an hour, she waded into the lake. The water was cool and silk-soft. She floated on her back, staring up at the cotton-ball clouds, and felt her body for the first time not as an object to be judged, but as a vessel for sensation. The sun on her eyelids. The water cradling her spine. The gentle pull of a current around her ankles.
"Is it that obvious?"
"You’ve spent years trying to exist outside your body," Dr. Varma said gently. "You analyze it. You hide it. What if you tried just… inhabiting it for a day? Without the armor of clothes, or the armor of judgment?"
Elara sat on a flat rock near the water's edge. The sun warmed her thighs. A breeze played across the back of her neck. She watched a woman with mastectomy scars dive cleanly into the lake, then surface with a shout of joy. She watched a heavyset man walk past, his back a roadmap of old acne scars, carrying a picnic basket.
Elara nodded. "It really is."