We were warned, of course. Not in parables or prophecies, but in bureaucratic memos, in vanishing headlines, in the silences that crept into the cracks of polite conversation. You could call it a slow forgetting, or a deliberate erasure. Either way, it worked. History was edited down to its skeleton. Women were whited out like a printer's correction strip, soft and final.

This book is not a warning. Warnings are for the salvageable. This is a residue. A trail of smoke after the building has collapsed. These stories are what remains when language splinters and law forgets who it was meant to protect. They are notes smuggled out of locked rooms, scratched into the underside of memory.

You may find them uncomfortable. That is not an apology.

Many of the women here have no names. Or they had names, but the names were changed by someone who thought he had the right to rename them. Some are mothers. Some are daughters. Some refused both. Some were never born at all.

You will notice, perhaps, a recurring absence. This is not by accident. Absence has a shape, a smell, a temperature. It leaves fingerprints. You are holding them now.

These are not stories of rebellion, not exactly. They are records of breath. Of breath held, breath stolen, breath remembered.

If there is a future beyond these pages, let it read us better than we were read