The misheard comment

Elizabeth wakes with a gasp, already talking.

"Jack. Jack, listen — I dreamed it. The curse. It told me the terms." She is sitting up in the grey light of your bedroom, hair a mess, eyes wide and certain, and you are still half-asleep when you say, "Tell me," because that is what you do now. You listen to her.

"One week. I stay here — I stay *yours* — and it breaks. If I slip, if I sleep with anyone else at any point... it takes me. Forever."

Then her breath catches, and you watch it happen. It starts at her hair, which darkens and loosens into curls she'd never spend money on, and rolls down through her like dye through water. Her posture changes. Her voice changes. Her face is still her face, but the expression on it belongs to a woman who has never once been faithful to anyone, and the body beneath the sleep-shirt reshapes itself into a caricature of every barfly fantasy she used to make fun of. Thirty seconds. Maybe forty. You witness all of it because there is nowhere else to be, and when it finishes she is gorgeous and vulgar and looking at you the way one looks at furniture.

"Ugh," she says, in a voice like smoke and bubblegum. Then her jaw sets. Something behind the stranger's eyes fights back into focus, and Elizabeth — some of Elizabeth — looks at you with real fury.

"Not happening," she says. "I don't care what it turned me into. I'm not letting some curse decide who and what I am. Seven days, Jack. Help me stay happy to be here, and I swear I'll make it worth—" She stops, disgusted at her own phrasing. "*Worthwhile.* God. This is going to be hell."