Andressa
I walked away from that study with my spine perfectly straight and my expression perfectly composed and absolutely nothing showing on my face.
That was the first rule. The one that had been pressed into me so early and so thoroughly that it had stopped feeling like a rule and started feeling like anatomy — just the way my face worked, the default setting, the thing my features returned to whenever anything happened that mattered. A woman who lets you see her face has already lost. My mother had said it to me at seven years old, standing behind me at a mirror in our pack's main house while I cried over something I could no longer remember, and I had stood there watching her smooth my expression with two careful fingers on my jaw and I had understood, even then, what was being transmitted. Not comfort. Instruction.
So I walked away.
