Turn 2 of 8

Text her yes and pick a tight crop top and short shorts to wear, no bra or panties. Show off her belly, tits and ass. Get wasted and overindulge on food. Fart and burp proudly. Arrive home, strip naked and pass out drunk and content.

Lena types *yes* before she can talk herself out of it, then *yes, obviously, stop guilting me,* then puts the phone face down on the counter and stands there with her heart going hard against the inside of all that new softness. It is done. Someone who knew her at twenty is going to sit across a table from her at twenty-four and do the arithmetic. She waits for the dread and gets, again, that low warm hum instead, spreading out from under her ribs like a hand pressed flat.

Tomorrow's outfit takes her most of the evening, which is absurd, because the whole point is that nothing fits. She lays things across the bed and rejects them one by one — the tunic that hides everything, the black dress with its forgiving drape, the cardigan, always the cardigon, her uniform of apology. What she keeps is a cropped white top that used to end at her navel and now ends well above it, and a pair of denim shorts from a summer she barely remembers, and when she holds them up they look like something belonging to a much smaller woman, which is exactly what they are.

She tries the whole thing on to be sure. It is worse than she hoped and better than she expected: the shorts grip her thighs and refuse to reach the top of her hips, the shirt sits high and useless, and the wide soft expanse of her stomach is simply *there*, unarguable, warm under her own hands. She turns to see the back view and has to laugh, one short surprised sound. Six weeks ago this reflection would have sent her to bed in the dark.

*Let them look,* says the voice, so gentle she almost misses that it is not hers. *You have never let anyone look. Tomorrow they look.*

"That's not you talking," Lena says to the mirror, and the woman in the mirror does not seem bothered either way. She takes the outfit off, hangs it on the wardrobe door where she will see it first thing, and eats the entire rest of the pasta standing at the sink, straight from the pan, until the tightness under her ribs is a solid pleasant ache. She rests both palms on her belly afterward and just breathes, feeling it rise and fall, feeling how much space it takes now.

In bed she lies on her back in the dark with the duvet folded down and lets the changes settle over her like weather — the heaviness of her hips, the way her arms rest wider from her sides than they used to, the strange contentment sitting in her chest where anxiety normally keeps its office. Tomorrow, drinks. Tomorrow, Priya's clever eyes. Her last thought before sleep is not *what will she think* but something closer to *I hope she notices*, and it arrives so smoothly that Lena cannot tell whose thought it was.