Turn 14 of 226

Tell Diane the truth — I feel amazing and I don't know why

The silence after Lena's last words sits in the office like something physical. The fluorescent light hums above them, and the food containers on the desk throw a faint sourness into the air that mixes with the deeper smell of Lena's unwashed skin, and Diane stands in the middle of it all with her arms at her sides and her face stripped bare of every professional expression she has ever learned to wear.

Lena watches her. She has said everything she can say — the wish, the warmth, the changes, the feeling that sits in her body like sunlight and will not dim. She has said it plainly and without embellishment, the way you describe the weather or the color of a wall, and she can see that the plainness is the thing that is breaking Diane. Not the content. The calm. The fact that Lena is sitting in a crop top dark with four days of sweat with her belly hanging out and her teeth unbrushed and her bare feet dirty on the carpet, and she is not performing crisis or recovery or anything in between. She is just there.

"I don't know what to do with this," Diane says. Her voice is flat and quiet. Not angry. Not concerned. The voice of someone standing in front of a shelf where every jar is labeled wrong and reaching for one anyway because the alternative is standing there forever.

"I don't know what to — Lena, a wish. You're telling me a wish did this."

"I'm telling you I feel amazing," Lena says. "I told you I don't know why. The wish is the closest I can get to an explanation. Maybe it's something else. Maybe I'm just — finally —" She stops. The sentence has no ending because she does not know where it goes. She rests her hands on her belly and feels the warmth pulse beneath her palms, slow and steady, and she looks at Diane and sees the moment where the question forming behind Diane's eyes is not professional anymore. It is the question of a person who has stopped checking a box and started wanting to know the answer.

"Does it hurt?" Diane asks. The question comes out small and surprised, as if it escaped from somewhere she did not authorize. She clears her throat.

"I mean — physically. Is there pain? Are you — is something wrong with you that you're not —"

"No," Lena says. "Nothing hurts. Everything feels right. That's the part I can't explain, Diane. I spent twenty-four years feeling wrong. And now I don't."

Diane's hand comes up to her face and presses against her mouth, fingers spread, and she stands like that for a long moment. Her eyes are wet — not crying, not yet, but the particular shine of a person whose body is responding to something their mind has not finished processing. She drops her hand and looks at Lena's bare feet on the carpet, then at the screen with the quarterly summary, then at the closed door, and Lena can see her running through the list of things she could do next and finding that none of them are adequate. She could leave. She could report something vague to Marcus. She could sit down. She could ask more questions. Every option is a door, and every door opens onto a room she does not have the furniture for.

"I need to go back to Marcus with something," Diane says, and her voice has lost its professional edge entirely. It is just a voice now. A woman's voice, tired and uncertain and standing in a small office that smells like sweat and old food.

"What am I supposed to tell him?"

Lena looks at her. The warmth pulses, patient and unhurried, and she feels a calm so deep it is almost liquid. She feels no urgency to solve Diane's problem. She feels no guilt about creating it. She feels, for the first time in her life, that someone else's discomfort is not hers to manage.

"Whatever you want," Lena says. "I'm not going to pretend to be something I'm not so your report makes sense."