Turn 4 of 8

Tell her I had an epiphany. Life is short, and there is no point in restricting myself

Lena tips the last of her second glass back before she answers, mostly because the silence is delicious and she wants to hold it a second longer. Priya is still standing, still doing that flick of the eyes down and up, and Lena lets her. The lamp above the table puts a warm ring of light on the wreckage in front of her — two bread boards scraped clean, the fries basket down to salt and oil, the glaze on the chicken plate going tacky at the edges.

"I had an epiphany," Lena says, setting the glass down. "Turns out life is quite short and I spent about nine years of it weighing chicken breast on a kitchen scale. So. No more restricting. That's the whole philosophy, that's the epiphany, you can have it for free."

Priya sits down slowly, the way people sit when they intend to stay a while and ask more questions than you want. She pushes her bag under the chair with one foot, folds her arms on the table, and looks at Lena — not at the shorts, not at the bare band of stomach resting soft against the table edge, but properly at her face, which is somehow harder to take.

"Okay, but you don't do this," she says. "You don't order the bread. You once made me split a starter with you and then didn't eat any of it. I'm not being a cow, I'm just — Lena, you're a genuinely different shape than you were at Anjali's wedding, and that was March."

"I know what shape I am." Lena shifts in the chair and feels everything settle again, the pleasant heaviness pressing outward, the waistband cutting its warm line. She spreads a hand flat over her belly without thinking about it and only notices she has done it when Priya's gaze drops to the gesture and lingers. She does not move her hand.

"I've never known it better, honestly. I look in the mirror now. I never used to look."

The waiter drifts over and Lena orders a third glass and the sticky doughnuts before Priya has ordered anything at all, which makes Priya laugh — a startled bark of it, half delight, half something else. Then the laugh fades and she leans in, and Lena can see the question forming behind her eyes, the specific one, the one that starts with *how* and not *why*, and something in Lena's chest goes very still and very warm at once, waiting for it.