Turn 16 of 19

He stepped closer, eyes searching my face. “Sophie, fight it. Please.” I wanted to. Part of me still did. But the bag’s weight on my arm felt right, and the hunger in my blood felt better than fear. I touched his cheek with long red nails and heard myself say, “I’m trying… but she’s so much stronger

He steps closer and I can smell him — laundry detergent, the stale tea he's been drinking all evening, the underneath-scent of the man I've shared a bed with for three years. His eyes search my face the way you'd search a window for someone trapped inside. I want him to find her. I want there to be a door somewhere behind the polished cheekbones and the knowing mouth, some hatch I could open and shout through: *I'm still in here, Marcus, I'm still in here, please.* But the woman in the mirror doesn't have a hatch. She has a smile that curves like a blade and eyes that hold nothing but patience.

"Sophie, fight it. Please." His voice cracks on the word *please* and I feel it in my chest — not in Vivienne's chest, in mine, in the place where Sophie still keeps her love for him like a letter she's been carrying unread. I want to fight. Part of me still does. The part that remembers his birthday and the way he sleeps with one foot outside the blanket and the sound he makes when he's trying not to cry, which is this sound, right now, the small wet catch in his throat that means he's holding everything back.

But the bag's weight on my arm feels right. The chain strap lies in the crook of my elbow like it was measured for me, and the warmth radiates through my forearm and into my chest and the hunger rises — not for food, not for comfort, but for something I can't name, something that tastes like red wine and dark corners and being looked at the way the silver-haired man looked at me in the bookstore. The hunger feels better than fear. It feels better than love. It feels like waking up after a long sleep, and that terrifies me more than anything else because I know what it means. It means the fight is already half over.

I raise my hand and touch his cheek. My nails are long and red — I don't remember painting them, I don't own red polish, but they're painted, perfect, the color of old wine — and they leave faint white lines on his skin where the pressure catches. He closes his eyes. One tear tracks down his face and touches my fingertip and I feel it burn.

"I'm trying," I say, and the voice is mine and isn't, the low honeyed register that Vivian wore like a second skin. "But she's so much stronger than me."

The words land and I hear them and something inside me — the last bright scrap of Sophie — screams. Not out loud. Inward. A sound like a bird hitting glass. Because I said *she* and I meant the bag and I meant Vivian and I meant the woman in the mirror and I meant myself, and the fact that I can't tell the difference anymore is the thing that should send me to my knees. But I don't fall. Vivienne doesn't fall. She stands in her heels with her bag on her arm and her hand on a crying man's face and she feels the warmth spread through her like sunlight through a window and she is not afraid. That's the worst part. I am not afraid.

Marcus opens his eyes. He takes my wrist — gently, like I'm something that might shatter — and moves my hand away from his face. He holds it between us, my red nails against his palm, and looks at my hand like it belongs to someone else.

"Then let me help you," he says. "Put the bag down. Stay. We'll figure it out. We'll — I don't know, we'll find someone, a doctor, someone who —" His voice is fraying, grasping at practical straws, and I feel the pity rise like bile because I know and he knows and the bag knows that no doctor in the world understands what's happening to me. The phone buzzes again. The bag pulses warm against my hip. And Marcus is still holding my hand, still waiting, still asking, and I have maybe thirty seconds left where the choice is still mine.