I drank the martini. I laughed with my friends. I looked at the photos of myself on the walls—not as a “revenge” tool, but as a map.
I had been so worried about him commenting on someone else’s beauty that I had forgotten I was the one who owned the gallery.
When the last guest left, the photographer came up to me. “So,” she said, “what do we do with the prints?”
I looked at the woman in the red dress on the screen. She looked back at me, fierce and final.
“Keep them,” I said. “I want to remember exactly what I looked like the day I stopped being an option and started being the whole damn point.”
I walked out of the studio, into the cool New York night, and deleted the Instagram app. I didn’t need the likes anymore. I finally liked myself.
