Monday morning. The soreness is there when I wake - interior, a tenderness that locates itself when I move. I lie there for a moment taking stock of it, and then I get up.

Downstairs Emily is at the sink, her back to me. She turns when she hears me and her face has something in it - a careful stillness, the effort of someone holding their expression steady over something else. The coffee is already made. She pours me a cup without speaking and then turns back to the sink and grips the edge of it with both hands and breathes slowly through her nose.

The walk happens the way weekend walks happen - without planning, Emily suggesting it over coffee, the two of us ending up on the path along the reservoir without having formally decided to go there.

It's a good morning for it. The spring air still cool enough to need a light layer, the trees along the path in the green of early May that doesn't last, the reservoir flat and grey-blue in the morning light. Emily walks beside me with her coffee in a travel mug and I walk beside her and we don't talk much, which is the right amount.

[Note - this section contains an alcohol-induced gap in Caden's memory with ambiguity around what happens during that gap, referenced later in the story. In case this is upsetting to some readers I'm giving warning here.]

---

The intercom buzzes twice before Hale's voice crackles through — "Who is it?" — the same baritone Caden had heard on a hundred conference calls, smooth as poured bourbon.

"Caden Voss." His voice comes out softer than he intended, vowels rounding at the edges.

A pause. The static hisses.

"Sorry?"

I wake before Emily. Grey light, the room quiet. I lie there for a moment and take stock - the lower back ache that's been there for five days is gone. Not reduced, gone. The heaviness behind the sternum still faintly there but lighter, beginning to clear. Something has shifted overnight.

I get up and go to the bathroom.

The next day comes with a heaviness I don't recognize at first - not the cramping, which has mostly eased, but something underneath it. Behind the sternum. In the legs when I stand. I eat breakfast and drink coffee and it doesn't lift the way tiredness lifts with caffeine. Just sits there, systemic, the whole body running slightly below its usual output.

---

Morning light finds him asleep in his clothes, barely rested. He packs both devices into his messenger bag and heads for the closest repair shop.

The bell jingles as he enters. A technician glances up from behind the counter — early twenties, a name tag reading ETHAN. His eyes skim past Caden's shoulders, landing somewhere around chin level. "Help you, ma'am?"

Caden's breath hitches. He sets the laptop and phone on the counter.

"Sir," he says, his pitch higher than expected, higher than a man's should be. He coughs, tries again. "Biometric lockout."

Every bump on the drive home lands in the same location. I park in the driveway and sit there for a moment with my hands on the wheel, the cramping still there.

The kitchen light is on when I come through the door. Emily is at the counter, laptop open, case files spread out, reading glasses on. She doesn't look up. I put my bag down quietly and go upstairs.

The bathroom. Stand under the fluorescent light for a moment.

I wake before the alarm.

This happens sometimes, the body surfacing on its own. But not groggy — more like arriving somewhere, the transition between sleep and waking unusually clean, as though I've come online all at once rather than in stages.

I lie still.

Caden wakes with his arms folded across his chest, fingers digging into his own ribs. A dull ache pulses beneath the skin — persistent, like the ghost of a bruise. He rolls onto his back and hisses as the sheets drag across his nipples, rough against skin that had turned traitor overnight. The pain isn't localized; it radiates outward in concentric circles, tightening with each breath. He presses the heel of his hand against his sternum, testing. The pressure sends a jolt down to his navel.

The locker room routine is practiced now. End stall, bag on the hook, change in under two minutes. Mark is already on the floor, because Mark is always already on the floor - changed in thirty seconds in the open bay, the way he always does, because Mark has never had a reason to think about changing in a locker room.

I find him at the dumbbell rack, mid-warm-up.

"You're late."

"Two minutes."

"Two minutes is late." He racks the weight. "Biceps first."

---

I am Vera.

The name is simply there — not chosen, not arrived at. Present the way the body is present, like the room is present. All three arrive at once and I can't tell you the order.

I wake before the alarm. The room is grey. I lie there taking stock - the burn is still there, but noticeably less. The itch is mostly gone. But there's something in the boxer briefs again, the same thick dampness against the labia as when I woke in the night.

I get up carefully, not waking Emily.

I pull open the waistband and check the boxer briefs in the bathroom. A white discharge in the crotch - different from last night, no sour smell, something milder. I drop the underwear to the floor and turn on the shower.

The ward bathroom. You are standing at the mirror with your shirt off and you don't know how long you've been standing here. The bathroom is empty except for you. The strip light hums above. Your hands are pressed flat against the sides of the belly, which is — large, is the only word, enormous compared to the last time you looked, the navel pushed outward, the skin taut and marked down the center by a dark line you didn't put there. You have been doing the inventory.

A bathroom stall. The ward bathroom — three stalls, the strip lighting humming above, the particular echo of hard surfaces. You are sitting on the toilet and you don't know how you got here. Early morning from the light under the stall door, the ward not yet fully awake. The gap between whatever came before and this stall on this morning is blank and featureless as the gaps always are.

The elevator opens and I step into the office. My shoes squeak against the linoleum, too loose, and my hips move with each step in a rhythm I'm not choosing. The receptionist gives me her usual nod.

The first thing is the seat.

Not pain — just wrongness, a soft pressure where there shouldn't be softness, the wooden chair coming up against sensitive and unfamiliar flesh, flesh that registers the hardness of the wood with a directness that makes you shift immediately, instinctively, your weight rolling forward onto your thighs. Better. Marginally. The underwear is wrong too — something silky, something that rides and gathers in ways that underwear shouldn't, the fabric light against skin that is reporting every thread of it.

You look at the table.