So, here's the thing. My Empathy power seems to have a blind spot when it comes to Dee. My theory is that her I-Belong-Here field interferes with it. Instead of reading Dee, maybe I'm reading the fake version of her that her power projects, the thing that shows you what you want or expect to see instead of what's really there. That's probably why I never before put together all the puzzle pieces that suddenly clicked into place in that room, and it's also why I'm still not sure there is any truth to the picture they assembled.
I hadn't before really thought about why Dee dropped out of college. I didn't put much thought into what wakes a person up in the middle in the night. What might drive a person to search the night looking for wrongs to right. I was thinking about it now, and I didn't like where it led.
We can only know as much of someone as they choose to share, and sometimes pain is bigger than words. It's one thing to hear the statistics. It's quite another to think about what they mean in the measure of real lives. One out of every six women in America will suffer a sexual assault at some point in her life. Now think about how many women you know. Almost certainly, some of them are carrying around secret wounds you know nothing about. Perhaps even someone very close to you. And you don't know.
I still don't know. Not for certain. How much can we ever really know another person's origin story?