i want to give up my bearings, slip out of who i am, shed everything, the way a snake discards old skin. - Khaled Hosseini

No one has to know. No one would. It would be her secret, one she would share with the mountains only. The question is whether it is a secret she can live with, and Parwana thinks she knows the answer. She has lived with secrets all her life.

A woman who will be like a rock in a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied but shaped by the turbulence that washes over her.

It's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.