Turn 14 of 19

Old desires felt childish. I wanted better restaurants, darker lipstick, attention that wasn’t soft. I still tried to hide it—smiled the old way, wore the old pajamas. He noticed everything. “You’re slipping away and you won’t even admit it.” I had no honest answer left that sounded like Sophie.

The old pajamas are a joke. I put them on — the flannel ones with the cartoon cats that Marcus bought me two Christmases ago — and they hang wrong on every part of me. The fabric strains across my chest, rides up over my hips, and the cropped pants barely reach mid-calf. I look in the mirror and see a woman playing dress-up in a child's clothes, and the cartoon cats grin up at me with an idiocy that makes my jaw tighten. Two weeks ago I would have thought they were cute. I would have thought *I* was cute. Now the word doesn't connect to anything real.

Marcus is in the kitchen making tea. I come out and try to smile the old way — wide, a little lopsided, the smile that said *I'm happy just to be here* — and I feel it form on my face and know immediately that it's wrong. The muscles don't move that way anymore. The smile comes out smaller, slower, more knowing, a smile that says *I'm here and I know why* and there is nothing wide or soft about it. He sees it. His hand pauses on the kettle.

"You're slipping away and you won't even admit it," he says. Not angry. Worse — he's tired. His voice is flat and thin and final, the voice of a man who has been building toward this sentence for days, maybe weeks, turning it over in his head the way you turn over a stone you already know is dead underneath. He sets the kettle down and looks at me — really looks, the way you look at something you're trying to memorize before it's gone — and I can see him cataloging every detail. The posture that isn't mine. The face that isn't mine. The cartoon-cat pajamas stretched over a body that has no business wearing them.

I open my mouth to answer. I want to say *I'm right here* in Sophie's voice, the high bright voice that used to make him laugh. I want to say *I'm scared* and *I need help* and *I don't know what's happening to me.* All of these things are true. But the voice that comes out is low and warm and certain, and it says: "Marcus, you're overthinking this," and the sentence is so dismissive, so polished, so Vivian that I hear it leave my mouth and feel a stranger's satisfaction bloom in my chest. His face closes like a door.

He nods once. He picks up his tea and walks to the living room and sits down and turns on the television and doesn't look at me again. The silence between us fills the apartment like water. I stand in the kitchen in cartoon-cat pajamas that don't fit and feel the bag's warmth from the bedroom and know that I have no honest answer left that sounds like Sophie. The phone buzzes in the bag. I don't check it. I don't need to. The reservation is for tonight. The name is Vivienne. The table is in the corner, and someone patient is waiting.