Turn 8 of 19

Thoughts started drifting. Quiet bookstore shifts felt dull. I caught myself eyeing older men and felt a flash of hunger that made me nauseous. Later at home I tried to sound like the old Sophie. My voice came out lower, silkier. He frowned. “You don’t even sound the same.”

The bookstore has become a cage. I stand behind the register and watch the clock and the minutes move like something stuck, and every customer who brings a book to the counter feels like an interruption of a life I should be living somewhere else. I used to love the quiet. The smell of old paper, the soft chime of the door, Dana's humming from the stock room — it was enough. It was mine. Now my fingers drum the counter and my eyes drift to the window and I catch myself wondering what Bistro Margot looks like at night, whether the corner table has candles, whether the texter is someone whose face I'd recognize.

A man comes in at noon. Silver hair, maybe fifty, wearing a cashmere coat that costs more than my rent. He browses the new fiction table with the casual focus of someone who reads seriously, and I watch his hands — the way he turns a book over, reads the back copy, sets it down with a small judgmental nod. Something stirs in my chest. Not admiration. Something hungrier. A pull that starts low in my stomach and rises through my ribs like warm water, and I am nauseous before I even understand what I'm feeling. He looks up and catches me watching, and I hold his gaze for one second too long. He smiles. I smile back. The smile is Vivian's — slow, knowing, a door opening onto a room he'll want to enter.

I excuse myself to the bathroom and grip the sink and breathe. The woman in the mirror looks back at me with perfect composure, not a strand of her glossy blonde hair out of place, her plum lips curved in an expression that is not distress. She looks like she's enjoying this. I splash water on my face and it doesn't smear anything, doesn't undo anything, and I press my palms against the glass and whisper, "Stop it. Stop it." My voice comes out low and silky and it doesn't sound like a plea. It sounds like a command from someone who expects to be obeyed.

That evening Marcus makes dinner again. I sit across from him and try to be Sophie. I try to ask about his day in the bright, thin voice I had a week ago, the one that went up at the end of sentences, the one that made people want to explain things to me. But the sound that comes out is different. Lower. Richer. Each word lands in the kitchen with a weight I don't intend, and I hear myself and think of jazz singers, of women who whisper across crowded rooms and make men lean in.

"You don't even sound the same," Marcus says. He's not eating. His fork is down. His face has that look again — the one from this morning, the one that's worse than anger because it's helplessness. He's watching someone he loves become unfamiliar, and he doesn't have the language for it, and the worst part is that some small and growing part of me doesn't care. Some part of me looks at his confusion and feels a flicker of impatience, a whisper that sounds exactly like Vivian's voice: *He was always temporary, dear. You just didn't know it yet.*

I push back from the table. "I'm just tired, Marcus." The words are warm but the voice underneath them is cool, controlled, and his flinch tells me he hears the gap between the two. My phone sits in the bag on the chair, and I can feel it waiting — the texter, the dinner, the corner table at Bistro Margot, the whole other life that is assembling itself around me like a fitted dress.