Turn 9 of 19

I forced the old habits—soft voice, shy posture, bag left at home. Within an hour my spine straightened again. I texted him: “Running late. Don’t wait up.” The second I retrieved the bag, confidence flooded back. I hated the relief that followed. Panic and pleasure tangled.

I leave the bag at home. That's the first thing. I set it on the cedar chest in the bedroom — not the chair, not somewhere I can reach for it — and I close the door and walk to the bookstore in my flats with my shoulders deliberately hunched and my arms crossed over my chest. I try to make myself smaller. I try to remember what small felt like. Dana glances up when I come in and says nothing, which is worse than saying something, and I spend the first hour doing inventory in the back room where nobody has to look at me.

By ten o'clock my spine has straightened on its own. I'm standing at the stock shelf with a pile of paperbacks in my arms and I realize my weight has shifted to one hip again, my chin is lifted, my shoulders are back. I catch my reflection in the glass of the fire extinguisher case and the woman staring back at me looks poised and bored and faintly contemptuous of the paperbacks in her arms. I didn't tell her to stand that way. She's just standing. My body has learned something and it won't unlearn it, and the absence of the bag doesn't reverse anything — it just makes me feel like I'm wearing a coat that's been taken away in winter. Cold. Irritable. Incomplete.

My phone is in my pocket. The text to Marcus is short and it types itself under my fingers: *Running late. Don't wait up.* I stare at the words after I send them. They're not mine. Sophie doesn't say *don't wait up* — Sophie says *I'll be home soon* and means it, Sophie worries about Marcus eating dinner alone, Sophie would never write a sentence that clean and dismissive and final. But my thumb hit send before the thought finished forming, and now the message sits there with its read receipt, and something inside me purrs.

I'm home by noon. Not because my shift ended — Dana can handle the floor — but because the apartment pulls at me, because the bedroom door calls, because the bag is sitting on that cedar chest waiting like a patient animal. I open the door and the smell hits me: leather and gold and old perfume, something that is not my perfume, something that belongs to a woman who has been dead for three months. I pick the bag up and the chain strap falls into my hand, warm, and the confidence floods back so fast it makes my knees buckle. My spine aligns. My chin lifts. My hips settle into their new architecture and I feel the whole strange body come online like a machine that was waiting for its power source.

I hate the relief. I hate how good it feels — how the anxiety drains out of me like bathwater, how the world sharpens into focus, how the boredom and restlessness collapse into a single point of purpose. I am standing in my bedroom holding a dead woman's handbag and I feel more like myself than I have in days. The panic and the pleasure are braided together so tight I can't tell where one ends and the other begins. My phone buzzes. The unknown number: *I knew you'd come back to it. She always did too. Tonight, then. 7:30. Corner table. Ask for Vivienne's reservation.* The bag pulses against my hip like a second heartbeat, and the woman in the vanity mirror smiles with my mouth and shows my teeth.