Turn 8 of 8

"One week," Lena says. "Fine. Easy."

And the instant it is out of her mouth the voice comes back — not gradually, not creeping, but simply present again, filling the cold draught in her chest as if it had never gone. *Say yes. You can always change your mind.* It is so warm and so reasonable that Lena has to set her glass down, because she has just felt, unmistakably, something else be relieved. Six weeks of thinking the voice was her own quiet preference, and here it is with an agenda of its own, and the agenda is that she should not be tested.

Priya is watching her face. "What," she says. "What just happened, you went somewhere."

"It talked." Lena's hand is still on her belly and she takes it off, deliberately, and puts it on the table where she can see it.

"It's been silent all night. Every second you've been sitting there. And I say yes to your week and it's back, telling me I can always change my mind. Priya, it didn't want to be in the room with you."

Priya sits very still, and then she does the thing that Lena will remember about tonight long after the food and the wine are gone: she reaches across the ruin of the table, past the glaze and the crusts, and takes Lena's greasy hand in both of hers without a flicker of squeamishness. Her grip is dry and hard and completely unafraid. Out in the bar the barman is stacking chairs. The window holds the two of them, one round and flushed and breathing carefully around a full stomach, one leaning in hard.

"So it's afraid of witnesses," Priya says. "Good. Then it gets one. I'm coming over Sunday and I'm cooking, and I'm staying, and it can be as quiet as it likes."

Lena nods. She means it, she is almost sure she means it — and beneath the meaning it, low and patient as ever, something says *you'll be hungry by Tuesday,* and for the first time since the bathroom mirror the thought does not feel like comfort at all. It feels like being told what she is going to do.