Turn 15 of 17

As Mia stands you realise she myst have changed too. she looks taller with more toned limbs, and is wearing an expensive dress that looks like it belongs on an executive in a big business. You find yourself remembering that you met when she took you on as her personal secretary

Mia straightens up behind you, and the movement catches your eye in the mirror — because she's taller than she was. Taller than she's ever been, really, a full head and more above your five-foot nothing, and her body has changed with it: long toned limbs, a poised executive posture, shoulders back with the ease of a woman who runs things. Her soft sweater and leggings are gone. In their place hangs an expensive charcoal dress, structured and sharp, the kind of thing that belongs on a CEO closing a deal, and it fits her like it was made for her, because it was.

You look up at her, blinking with your huge doll lashes, and the confusion drifts in again — that warm, floaty feeling of a thought arriving already finished. Of course she's like this. Of course she's powerful. She was always the successful one, wasn't she?

She's the one who hired you. The memory settles into place, soft and certain: meeting her in a glass-cornered office high above the city, her shaking your hand across an enormous desk, taking you on as her personal secretary. That's how you met. That's always how you met. The apartment, the relationship, all of it grew out of that — her choosing you, her deciding what you'd be.

"You've gone quiet," Mia says, and there's real pleasure in it. She turns you by the shoulders to face her, and looking up — up — at her is easy now, natural, the angle your neck was made for.

"Do you like it? I thought it was fair. You got to be the pretty one. I get to be the one who owns things." She smooths a strand of your platinum hair back with one ringed hand.

"You were such a good secretary, sweetheart," she says, smiling down at you. "Very attentive. Not so smart, but so, so pretty. Everyone said so." And the terrible thing, the thing your sinking stomach notices while your glossed lips keep smiling, is that you can't find the memory that says otherwise. There's just the office, and the desk, and her hiring you, and the dress, and the height of her.