Turn 12 of 226

Tell Diane the truth — I feel amazing and I don't know why. She is still confused

Diane's hands drop to her sides. She looks at Lena the way someone looks at a map that has been rotated ninety degrees — the landmarks are all there, the rivers and the roads, but nothing is where it should be. The silence stretches long enough that the fluorescent light fills it entirely, a thin electrical whine that Lena has never noticed before and now cannot stop hearing.

"I'm being reassigned," Diane says, and then her eyes widen slightly, as though the words came out without permission. She recovers fast.

"What I mean is — I came here because people were talking. About how you looked. Your appearance. The barefoot thing. Jim from Accounting asked me if you were going through something." She pauses.

"He didn't ask nicely."

Lena registers this. Jim from Accounting is a man who wears the same navy polo every Wednesday and smells like aftershave applied with a ladle. The idea that he has opinions about her appearance sits in her mind like a small, absurd stone. She almost laughs. She does not, because Diane's face has changed — the professional mask is still there, but something underneath it has gone brittle.

"I told them you were probably fine," Diane continues. "I said maybe it was a medication thing, or a — a situation. I gave them options because that is what you do. You give people options so they can pick the one that makes them comfortable." She looks at Lena's belly, bare and resting heavy against the desk.

"But you're not giving me options, are you?"

"No," Lena says.

"You're telling me you gained weight on purpose. That you haven't showered in four days on purpose. That you feel —" Diane's voice catches on something. Not emotion. Frustration. The specific frustration of a competent person encountering a problem that competence cannot solve.

"— incredible. And the report you sent today was the cleanest quarterly summary I've seen in two years."

Lena watches Diane's hands. They are shaking — not much, just a fine tremor in the fingers, the kind that comes from holding something too tightly for too long and then letting go. Diane has been holding this since she knocked on the door. Probably longer. Probably since she saw Lena walk through the office barefoot this morning with her belly hanging out and her hair matted and her face serene, and every competent instinct in her body said: fix this, fix this, fix this.

"So here is my problem," Diane says, and her voice is steady now, stripped down to its frame. "I was sent here to check on you. Not by Jim. By Marcus. And I need to go back to him with something, and I cannot go back with 'she likes it and her work is great' because that is not an answer, Lena. That is a riddle."

The name lands in the room. Marcus. Their supervisor. The one Diane was supposed to be here for. Lena feels the warmth pulse once beneath her palms, slow and unconcerned, and she understands with perfect clarity that Diane has just told her something she was not supposed to tell. The mask did not slip — it was ripped off by the weight of Lena's sincerity, which is heavier than any lie because it cannot be filed or categorized or handed back in a neater package. Diane is standing in her office with the door closed and she has run out of options and she is looking at Lena the way a person looks at a locked door when they have tried every key.