Turn 16 of 17

As he slips yoy into some skyscraper platform heels ahe pulls you through what is now a penthouse. She explains that she really did still love you but that things needed to change. As you sashay along next to her you feel natural. You are Mias little dool. Her fun little accessory

"Sit," Mia says, pointing to the vanity stool, and you sit, because of course you do. She kneels — powerful women apparently still kneel for this — with a pair of skyscraper platform heels in her hands, patent pink, ankle-strapped, absurd.

"These were my idea weeks ago," she says, sliding one onto your small foot, buckling the strap with quick fingers. "You used to have opinions about girls in shoes like this. Remember?" You don't. Or you do, dimly, but the memory has gone soft at the edges, like a photo left in the sun.

She pulls you up by both manicured hands and you rise into the heels, teetering once, and then your body simply corrects — hips out, spine curved, weight finding its place — and you're walking. She leads you by the wrist out of the bedroom, and the apartment unspools around you into something impossible: the hallway opens past floor-to-ceiling glass, city lights spilling in gold and blue below, marble underfoot, everything wide and glassy and expensive. It's a penthouse now. It's obviously always been a penthouse.

"I did love you," Mia says as she walks you along it, her pace unhurried, your sashay keeping easy step beside her. "That part was true, sweetheart. I still do. But you made everything you touched cheap, so we're starting over — new life, new history, new you. Cleaner."

And you feel natural. That's the thing that keeps catching, somewhere under the gloss: not the heels, not the dress, not the giggle that answers her before you choose it. You feel like you belong at her wrist like this. Small, pretty, sparkling, trailing an executive through a penthouse at midnight. Her little doll. Her fun little accessory, and the thought doesn't frighten you the way it should — it settles warm, like it was yours all along.

"There, look," Mia says, stopping at the glass and turning you toward your own reflection: the doll, the blonde, the tiny dress, standing at the end of her arm like a finished purchase. "Do you see it now? That's what you'll become. Except, sweetheart — " she smiles, and rings catch the city light — "you already are."