Turn 4 of 23

Check the mirror again and really look at what fourteen days have done. In the end, be proud of the changes.

Lena rolls off the couch and stands, and the weight of her settles into her feet differently than it did two weeks ago. She walks to the bathroom with the slow, heavy confidence of someone who has stopped hurrying. The vape is warm in her hand. She takes a long draw and sets it on the counter, then steps in front of the mirror and just — looks.

The woman in the glass is someone she would have walked past on the street without recognizing. Her face is rounder, softer at the jaw, with a fullness beneath her chin that blurs the angle of her neck into her chest. Her breasts hang heavier than they ever have, full and soft, resting against the upper slope of a belly that now protrudes in a complete, unbroken arc — not a bulge but a presence, a roundness that pushes outward from just below her ribs and doesn't stop until it rests against the top of her thighs when she sits. The skin is smooth, warm, faintly marked with the beginning of stretch lines along the underside where the weight is newest.

She turns sideways and lifts her arms. Her ass is enormous compared to what she remembers — wide, deep, each cheek heavy and full, spreading visibly where it meets her thigh. Her hips have widened until the bathroom doorframe feels narrower than it used to. Her arms are softer, the backs of them yielding when she presses a finger in. The blonde stubble on her legs and underarms catches the light — thick enough now to be visible, a pale gold against skin she hasn't washed or shaved in two weeks. Her hair hangs limp and dark with oil, parted where she sleeps on it, flat against her skull. A thin sheen of grease sits on her forehead and the bridge of her nose.

She leans closer to the glass. Her breath is stale. She can smell herself — warm, sour, human — and the old Lena would have flinched, would have grabbed a washcloth, would have apologized to an empty room. Instead she just breathes. She runs a hand down her belly and watches the skin yield under her fingers, then spring back slowly. She cups a breast and feels its weight fill her palm. She turns again, looks over her shoulder at the full, spread width of her ass, and the warmth that moves through her isn't arousal this time — it's deeper, quieter, more complete.

"That's me," she says to the mirror. Her voice is rough from the wine and the smoke. She doesn't qualify it. She doesn't add *but* or *I should* or *I need to*. She says it the way someone says *the sky is blue* or *water is wet* — a fact observed and accepted. She rests both hands on her belly and feels it rise and fall with her breath. Fourteen days. Twenty pounds. Greasy hair and hairy legs and a stomach that rumbles and a body that burps and farts without asking permission. A body that has never, in her entire adult life, felt more like home.

She stands there for a long time. Then she pads back to the couch, picks up her phone, and opens the delivery app. Not because she's hungry yet — though she will be — but because the wish is still warm, and she wants to keep feeding it, and for the first time in twenty-four years she can say she is genuinely, unreservedly proud of something her body has done.