Admitting she needed help was like admitting she needed to be saved, and that wouldn’t do at all — she wasn’t a princess, she couldn’t be, or she’d still be in that coffin, curled in her grief like a blanket. She expected a counselor to call her confused, a silly girl who’d made a silly mistake (when that mistake was her reason to live and her life a mistake without it.)

“I’m going to be a prince,” she said, and the counselor listened, nodded, and asked without judgment — “What is a prince?”