dismantling her own sewing machine and lubricating all the parts and reassembling them so that they meshed and made stitches again, so that when her body’s rebellion was finally explained in such tangible terms it marked a break with her previous life as complete and uncrossable as the abyss the doctor explained lay between her nerve endings. Continuity between the new Anne and the old one was no more possible than communication between her isolated nerves—yet it was this clean severing that had made it possible, somehow, to go on.
