Turn 19 of 226

Go to my office and start working — let them come to me. I perform even better than on Friday

The elevator opens on her floor and Lena walks to her office with the unhurried stride of someone who has nowhere to hide and no interest in hiding. The carpet is cool under her bare feet. Two people pass her in the hallway — Tom from Legal and a woman whose name she has never learned — and both of them perform the same micro-calibration: eyes forward, posture rigid, a sudden and intense focus on their phones. Nobody says good morning. Lena does not need them to.

Her office door is open. She sits down, and the chair groans faintly under her weight — a new sound, one that was not there Friday, and the smallness of it sends a pulse of warmth through her belly that she feels in her throat. The monitor wakes. The quarterly projections are already loaded from Friday's session, and she begins where she left off, fingers moving across the keyboard with a speed that surprises even her. The numbers make sense. The patterns make sense. Everything makes sense when she is working, the same way everything makes sense when she is eating or exercising or lying on her floor — the wish has made her body a place where competence lives without friction.

She eats at her desk by nine-thirty. The delivery arrives — she ordered it from the elevator, two breakfast burritos and a large orange juice — and she eats them one-handed while scrolling through the projection model with the other. Tortilla crumbs fall onto her belly and sit there in the soft hair below her navel. She does not brush them off. A burp rises through her chest, deep and resonant, and she lets it out into the room without looking up from the screen. Her body is making sounds now that it did not make a week ago — the creak of the chair, the whisper of her thighs against each other when she shifts, the faint pop of her spine adjusting to the new weight distributed across her hips. She works through all of it.

By noon she has finished the projection model, the variance analysis, and a first draft of the regional summary that Marcus has been asking about for two weeks. She reads through her own work and feels a quiet, fierce satisfaction that has nothing to do with the warmth — this is hers, the product of a mind that is operating at a pitch she has never experienced. Her body is uncomfortable in the chair, the shorts digging into her hips, the crop top riding up with each breath, and the discomfort is not discomfort. It is information. Her body is telling her it has outgrown this chair, these clothes, this office, and she is listening with the same attention she gives the numbers on the screen.

A knock at the door at one-fifteen. She does not look up immediately. She finishes the sentence she is writing, tabs the file, and then raises her head. The doorway is filled with the specific posture of someone who has been standing there longer than the knock suggested — weight shifted, hand still raised, the body language of a person who knocked twice and was not sure they wanted to either time.

Diane is standing in the hall. She is wearing a grey cardigan — the same one, or an identical one — and her reading glasses are on top of her head and her face has the careful blankness of someone who spent the weekend rehearsing a conversation and has just discovered that the rehearsal is useless. Her eyes move from Lena's face to the crop top to the bare belly to the crumbs on Lena's stomach to the food containers on the desk to the bare feet propped on the wastebasket, and the circuit takes less than two seconds but Lena can see each stop on the journey register behind Diane's eyes like a series of small, accumulating impacts.

"Hi," Diane says.

"Hi," Lena says.

Diane stands in the doorway. The hallway behind her is empty — lunch hour, most of the floor gone — and the silence between them is different from Friday's silence. Friday's silence was shocked. This one is deliberate. Diane has chosen to be here, and Lena can see the cost of that choice in the set of her jaw and the way her fingers are gripping the strap of her bag.

"I need to talk to you," Diane says. "Not as — not for Marcus. Just me. Can I come in?"

Lena gestures at the guest chair. Diane looks at it, looks at Lena, and sits down. The chair is too close. Everything in this office is too close now, because Lena takes up more of it than she used to, and Diane's knees are approximately six inches from Lena's bare toes on the wastebasket. The smell reaches Diane — Lena can tell by the way her nostrils flare and then flatten, the involuntary response of a body encountering six days of unwashed skin and old food and the particular musk of a body that has been exercising and eating and masturbating without interruption. Diane does not stand up.

"I spent the whole weekend thinking about what you told me," Diane says, and her voice is steady in the way that things are steady right before they are not. "About the wish. About you feeling — amazing. About all of it. And I need to ask you something, and I need you to answer me honestly, and I need you to understand that I am asking as someone who gives a damn about you and not as someone who is building a file."

She pauses. Her hands are in her lap now, fingers interlocked, knuckles pale.

"Are you okay? Not — not the version you tell Marcus. Not 'I feel amazing.' The real version. Are you okay?"