Turn 3 of 19

Day three my breasts grew heavier, straining the bra. At work I caught myself standing with one hip cocked. A customer smiled longer than usual. I felt exposed and strangely powerful at the same time. I hid the bag in my locker, heart racing, and told myself I still had control.

The bra I put on this morning doesn't fit. It's the same one I've worn for two years — a plain cotton thing from a multipack, unremarkable, reliable — and now the cups press flat against me, the straps digging trenches into my shoulders. I stand in front of the bedroom mirror and watch the fabric strain, watch the soft overflow at the edges where there used to be nothing but flat skin. My breasts are heavier. That's the only word for it. Not larger in the way puberty made them larger, a gradual accumulation, but heavier, as if they've arrived fully formed from some other woman's body. I hook a finger under the strap and snap it loose with a relief that makes my eyes water.

At the bookstore I catch myself standing wrong. My weight shifts to my left leg, my right hip cocked out, one hand resting on the counter. I look like I'm posing. I look like Vivian in every photograph I've ever seen of her — the gallery openings, the garden parties, the one Christmas card where she leaned against a doorframe with a glass of champagne and made the whole room seem like it was arranged for her benefit. I straighten up. Thirty seconds later I've shifted back without noticing.

The customer is maybe forty-five, tweed jacket, reading glasses pushed up into greying hair. He brings a copy of *The Door* by Magda Szabó to the counter and smiles at me while I ring it up. Not a polite smile. A longer one. His eyes move from my face to my collarbone to the way my shirt — the same shirt I've worn a dozen times — pulls across my chest in ways it didn't last week. I feel the seam at the button line straining and resist the urge to cross my arms. Instead I hold his gaze a beat too long, and his smile widens, and something warm and predatory unfurls behind my sternum.

I take my break early. The staff locker room is a narrow corridor with metal boxes and a single flickering fluorescent tube. I shove the bag into my locker and slam the door. The metal rattles. My heart is hammering. I press my forehead against the cool steel and breathe — in through the nose, out through the mouth, the way the therapist I saw for three sessions in college told me to. The bag is behind two inches of metal and a padlock and I can still feel it. Not heat exactly. Not sound. A presence, low and constant, the way you feel a cat watching you from across a dark room.

"I still have control," I say to the locker. My voice sounds wrong. Too steady. Too assured. Like the words are true because someone else believes them for me.

My phone buzzes in my pocket. The same unknown number. This time there's no greeting, no preamble. Just four words: *You missed our dinner.*