Turn 4 of 7

Dylan threatens to tell other people what Mia has done. When she asks exactly what he plans to say, he discovers he can no longer speak his old name and can only refer to himself as Jade.

You gather what remains of your fury, feeling it rise like bile in your throat, and you point one of your manicured fingers at her with an intention that comes out all wrong—wrist too bent, gesture too emphatic, reading as dramatic rather than threatening.

"I'll tell everyone," you say, and the voice that emerges is breathy with indignation, more wounded than dangerous. "I'll tell them what you did to me. I'll go to the police, I'll—"

"What will you tell them, exactly?" Mia interrupts, and something in her calm dismantles your momentum. You open your mouth to say your name, to establish yourself as Dylan Morrison, thirty-two, software consultant, the man who pays the mortgage on this house, and the syllables die somewhere between intention and articulation. You try again and feel your tongue shaping different sounds, your lips pursing around consonants that feel like costume jewelry in your mouth.

"J-Jade," you hear yourself say, and the name arrives complete with its own intonation—rising at the end, perpetually questioning, perpetually available. You try to force "Dylan" past your teeth and your throat seizes, rejecting it like a swallowed bone. "Jade will tell them," you manage, and even this correction sounds like flirtation, like promise, like the opening move of someone who has never been taken seriously in her life.

Mia's smile is thin and patient. "Jade will tell them what?"

You grasp for specifics and watch them dissolve. The transformation—what words exist for it? Your vocabulary feels sanded down, your thoughts circling the same shallow pools. You remember being angry about something important, something fundamental, but the details keep sliding away from you, replaced by more immediate concerns: the pressure of your platform heels against your arches, the way your new breasts shift when you breathe, whether the light from the window flatters your complexion. You open your mouth to explain the violation, the theft of your body, your self, and what emerges is: "She was really mean to Jade."

The grammar registers wrong even as you speak it—you, you wanted to say, she was mean to me—but the correction won't come. Third person, you realize with fading horror. You're thinking of yourself in third person now, and the distance feels less like strategy and more like the truth of your existence. Jade stands in the living room. Jade is upset. Jade doesn't know what to do next. The thoughts arrive in this simplified construction, and somewhere beneath them a more complex mind screams without language.

"They won't believe Jade," you admit, and the resignation in your voice sounds like acceptance, like the surrender you've been fighting. You feel your posture softening further, your shoulders dropping, your weight settling into the pose the heels demand—presented, displayed, waiting to be noticed. The name repeats in your mind like a mantra or a cage: Jade, Jade, Jade. Each iteration wears the old name smoother, until Dylan feels like someone you might have dated once, someone who didn't treat you well, someone whose details you no longer bother to recall.