Turn 4 of 13

Show her the Module Four email

You set the tea down on Rae's coffee table, carefully, the way you do things now — with a precision that doesn't feel entirely yours. Your phone is in your back pocket. You reach for it and your hand doesn't hesitate, which is strange, because part of you expected it to. You expected some resistance, some whispered instruction to leave the phone where it is, to change the subject, to say *no, everything's fine* the way you said *I've been sleeping better* without deciding to. But nothing redirects you. The phone is in your hand and the inbox is open and there it is.

The subject line reads: *Sam, Module Four is ready for you.*

You turn the screen toward Rae. She leans forward, takes the phone from you — gently, the way she'd take something fragile — and reads it. You watch her face. The news captions scroll behind her, silent, irrelevant. A water main in Dorset. A council vote in Leeds. Rae's eyes move left to right, once, and then again, and then she looks up at you.

"Sam," she says. "You never gave them your first name."

"No."

"The course registration — what did you fill in?"

"S. Ortega. That's what I put. S. Ortega, the card details, the email. I checked, Rae. I went back and checked the confirmation. It says S. Ortega."

She reads the subject line again, her lips moving slightly. Then she scrolls down, her thumb careful on the screen, and you realize she's looking at the body of the email now. You haven't read it yourself. You didn't open it — you just showed it, the preview was enough, but now she's in it and you can see her face change. Not alarm, not yet. Something closer to the expression she wore when she watched the shipping container documentary and the detective found the thing he wasn't expecting.

"What does it say?" you ask, and your voice comes out level, almost calm, and that calm doesn't feel like yours either.

Rae looks up. "It says, *Thank you for your progress in Module Three. You'll find the recording for Module Four attached. Please listen at your usual hour.*" She pauses. "And then it says, *The mirror was a good instinct. We'll build on that.*"