Turn 15 of 19

I stood in the doorway in the leopard top, tight skirt, sheer hose and heels, black bag hanging from my fingers. Fully the elegant, predatory MILF the bag had been shaping. He looked at me like he’d lost someone. “Is this still you?” I opened my mouth to say yes. The voice came out was Vivienne's.

narrationThe leopard-print top clings to every curve the bag has given me. The skirt hits mid-thigh, black, structured, hugging hips that didn't exist a month ago. Sheer hose, heels I found in the back of Vivian's closet — three inches, black patent, still in their box — and the bag hangs from my fingers on its gold chain, swinging gently, warm against my knuckles. I have spent an hour on this. Not nervously, not the way Sophie would have fumbled with eyeliner and second-guessed hemlines. I have dressed with precision, with intent, with the calm authority of a woman who knows exactly what she looks like and what it does to a room.

Marcus is on the couch. He looks up and his face does something terrible — it empties. Not shock, not anger. Emptiness. Like someone unplugged a light. His eyes move from my heels up the hose to the skirt to the top to my face and stay there, searching for something, and I watch him not find it.

"Is this still you?" His voice breaks on the last word. Not loud. Quiet. The kind of quiet that costs something.

I open my mouth to say yes. I want to say yes. I want to say *of course it's me, Marcus, I'm still in here, I'm trying, I don't know how to stop this.* The voice that comes out is low, smoky, certain — Vivienne's voice, Vivienne's cadence, warm and unhurried and utterly calm.

"Darling, I've always been here."

He flinches. Not at the words — at the voice. At the way it fills the room like perfume, like something expensive and lingering. His hands grip his knees. He stands slowly, like a man much older than twenty-six, and he walks toward me and stops three feet away. Close enough to touch. He doesn't touch me. His eyes are wet and he's holding himself together with visible effort, the muscles in his jaw working.

"You sound like her," he whispers. "You sound like your aunt."

The bag pulses against my fingers. Warm. Patient. I can feel it waiting — not pushing, not demanding, just present, the way a chair waits for someone to sit. My phone buzzes inside it. The restaurant. The reservation. The man who kept a napkin. Marcus is standing in front of me and I can feel the whole life we built together — the bookstore, the apartment, the cartoon-cat pajamas, the burned pasta — and it fits like the old clothes. Too small. Too soft. Already outgrown.

I don't touch his face. I don't reach for him. Vivienne wouldn't, and the body is Vivienne's now, and the hands that would have reached for him belong to a girl I can still almost remember being. Almost. The gap is narrowing. The door is closing. And the worst part, the part I can't say to anyone, is that I don't know if I want it to stop.