Turn 34 of 228

Weigh myself and see if the wish kept working. It did. Read Diane's reply in the morning and check OnlyFans reactions to coffee shop post. Then go to work

Morning light cuts through the gap in the curtains and falls across the couch and the floor and the stained cushions where Lena lies. She wakes slowly — not jolting, not reaching for anything — and the first thing she feels is the weight of herself pressing into the couch. Heavier than yesterday. She knows it before she stands. The wish kept working while she slept, while she lay in the dark feeling things she didn't have names for, while the tears dried on her skin. Her belly is wider against the couch arm. Her breasts have spread further across her chest. Her thighs press together from hip to knee and the flesh between them is soft and warm and new.

She stands and the couch groans and her knees pop and she walks to the bathroom and steps on the scale. The display flickers — 267. Seven pounds overnight. She stares at the number and the wish hums beneath her ribs, quiet and constant and utterly without urgency, and she doesn't fight it and doesn't celebrate it. She just stands on the scale and lets the number be what it is. Her phone is on the bathroom counter and she picks it up and the screen shows Diane's reply from last night, unread, the notification that pulsed on her belly while she fell asleep: *You don't have to know what to do with it. You just have to let it be there. I'll see you Thursday. Sleep well, Lena.*

She reads it twice. The words sit in her chest the way the vodka sits — warm, spreading, loosening something she didn't know was tight. Diane used her name. Diane told her to sleep well. Lena sets the phone down and looks at herself in the mirror — 267 pounds, stubble thickening toward real hair, skin unwashed for nine days, the dark trail below her navel more pronounced, her belly round and wide and resting against the top of her thighs — and she doesn't take a photo. She just looks. Then she picks up the phone again and opens OnlyFans.

The coffee shop post has 247 likes. The subscriber count reads 97. Comments have multiplied overnight: *the way you talk about her is the realest thing on this whole site*, *you cried and you didn't perform it and that's why this works*, *I've been following since the bikini photo and this is the first time I believed you*, *please tell Diane we love her too.* A twenty-five-dollar tip arrived at 3 AM with no message. Another at 5 AM: *you found one person. hold onto that.* Lena scrolls through the comments and they don't hit her the way the others have — not the hot flare of pride or the pulse between her thighs. They sit in her the way Diane's text sits in her. Warm and quiet and strange.

She walks to work barefoot and naked and the morning is cool on her skin and her body moves through it — heavier, wider, 267 pounds of woman who cried in the dark last night and meant it. The security guard is at the lobby desk and his eyes find her and he looks down at his phone and she walks past and takes the elevator and unlocks her office and sits in the chair and her belly spreads against the desk edge and her thighs fill the seat. The client queue is full. She opens the first report and starts reading. The stain on the carpet is still dark beneath her chair. The wrapper from yesterday's chips is on the windowsill. Everything is where she left it. Everything is where it belongs.