Dozens of my coworkers knew I'd been sexually assaulted, and almost none of them asked a question that made me relive it. Telling them was still one of the hardest parts. For HR, EAP, and managers: the difference between asking how someone is and making them relive it, and what helps.

My brother once asked why my husband and my dad didn't beat up the man who assaulted me. Before that night, I'd have asked the same thing. Nobody in my house did what they would have predicted, me included, and the comment sections on the Cornell case are making the same mistake about Jane Doe.

People ask me why the man who assaulted me is just X in my book. This is the whole answer: why I refused to give him a place in my story, and who the story belongs to instead. A follow-up to Some People Call Me Jess.

If I'd been in charge, my name would be Lacy. What I got instead was Jessi, courtesy of a fifth-grade teacher with two Jessicas in one class. On the names we're given, the ones people have to earn, and the one I almost used instead.

A friend's husband stopped reading the book on page 15. He'd met me once. On the men who are close enough to us to read it and too close to finish it, and what my husband noticed about the one who never started.

I would be fine, and then I would be furious with my kids over nothing, with no idea what had set me off. That was the woman people were asking how she was doing. On why the person you're checking on so often gives you almost nothing back, and why that answer isn't about you.