Not her fault, then, if her nerves could be considered not-her—and what else could they be, those shredded nebulae whose feeble glow reached Anne’s imagination across light-years of the void of her ailing insides? Anne had sobbed into her hands while the poor doctor, whose experience of suffering to that point had left him unprepared for such a moment, struggled to put on Anne’s socks. He hadn’t realized that her tears weren’t of despair but of relief. It wasn’t in her head. She hadn’t made it all up. She was not a hysteric but the victim of a disorder that could be explained in the simplest
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