Turn 7 of 8

But I don't care. Its made my life better

"But honestly? I don't care," Lena says, and the words come out easier than anything she has said all night. "That's the part you're going to hate. Whoever's talking, whatever it wants — it's made my life better. I sleep. I don't spend twenty minutes deciding whether I'm allowed a sandwich. I got dressed tonight in about four minutes and I didn't cry once. Do you know how long it's been since I got dressed without crying?"

Priya doesn't say anything. She turns her wine glass a slow half-circle on the table, and the silence stretches long enough that Lena starts to feel the fullness in her again, the deep pressing weight of the meal settling, her breath having to work around it. Out in the room someone's card machine beeps twice. The window has gone fully dark and Lena can see the pair of them reflected in it, herself round and pink-cheeked and spilling comfortably over the edges of everything, Priya thin and upright and looking at her the way you look at a bridge with a crack in it.

"Can I ask you one thing," Priya says at last, "and can you not do the voice where you're being funny about it."

"Fine."

"Do you actually want this." Priya sets the glass down and leaves her hand flat beside it.

"Not do you like it. Not is it better than before. Do *you* want it — you, Lena, the one who used to text me at two in the morning about her thighs. Or does something else want it, and you're the one carrying it for them?"

The voice, Lena notices, has nothing to say. It has been quiet since Priya sat down, and its absence is a strange cold draught in her chest, like a room where the heating has just cut out. She opens her mouth to answer and finds only the warm heavy certainty in her belly, which is not the same thing as an answer, and she hates that she can tell the difference.

"One week," Priya says into the gap. "That's what I want. Eat like a normal person for one week — not restrict, I'm not asking you to weigh chicken again, just *normal*, three meals, no going past full on purpose. If nothing happens and you keep gaining, fine, I'll believe every word about the wish and I'll come with you to whoever you want, priest, endocrinologist, I don't care. But if you can't even try it for a week —" she stops, and her jaw tightens. "Then it isn't comfort, Lena. It's something driving."