But she never found the resolve to end things for good. Not because she was afraid of the pain—for at that point she wasn’t sure she could still feel pain—but because of the shame. Because even after everything, despite how numb she’d become, what lingered were the tenets of the academic world, which were so burned into her bones that even in her weakest moments she still felt their echoes. If she died, they would think she had failed.
