The most useful descriptions came from people who had known her for years and were still paying attention. Daen had been describing her for twenty years, which gave him a baseline and, by extension, gave her one. His note from last Tuesday: tired around the eyes, but held well, posture changed from last month, something looser in the shoulders. She had written this down as soon as she got home.
Corael had never been able to see herself directly. This was not a metaphor. Mirrors showed her the room, showed other people in the room, showed what was behind her when she turned. When she looked for herself, she found nothing there, not absence exactly, which would have had a shape, but a gap in the visual record that had been there since she was seven years old. She had gone to several doctors in her twenties. They had found nothing wrong.
The log had thirty-one years of entries. She had learned that not all sources were equal. People with strong feelings about her gave inflated reports. People who were distracted gave incomplete ones. The most useful sources were the people who looked at her routinely, without agenda, and would report back accurately if asked. She had six of those now. She considered herself well-documented.
The problem she had been sitting with lately was her mother, who at seventy-nine was beginning to see less clearly. Her mother had always been one of her best sources, attentive, specific, not given to sentiment. Last month she had described Corael as looking "like your father." Corael's father had been a compact man with heavy eyebrows and a short upper lip. She had no reason to believe this was currently accurate. It might be, or her mother might be projecting. She did not know how to weight this and could not ask for clarification without suggesting the description was wrong.
She was sitting at the kitchen table with her hands in her lap. Her hands she could see directly, without intermediary: the knuckle on her right index finger where she had broken it at nineteen, the small scar on her left palm from a fence post when she was eleven, the veins going up the back. She had documented these many times. They were the only part of herself she could verify without asking anyone.
She looked at them for a while.