The paddle is in the bag in the hall closet and I've been looking at the closet door since eight in the morning.

I get it out around ten. The bag has the new paddle in it. It's the replacement I ordered after I put the other one through its edge guard the night this started. I take it out and grip it. The grip wraps the same. The flare of the handle, the weight forward of my hand, all of it as it should be. I bounced a ball off the face a few times in the apartment and it goes where I aim it.

Wes is good at managing women, until his body starts becoming one. He's sleeping with two women and lying to both of them, and they respond to his shifting body in ways that confuse and excite him even as they terrify him. Jenny, the ex he wronged, is a gynecologist who knows more than what she lets on. A story about desire, consequence, and what it feels like to learn something from the inside.

---

The hallway's dark and I don't bother with the light.

Mail on the floor I haven't dealt with. The kitchen through the doorway. I stand on the rug in my coat for a moment — just standing, just the quiet — and then I kick my shoes off. I stand there in my socks on the rug and just breathe.

After Marcus leaves I sit at the terminal for a while without doing anything.

Seo-yeon is at her bench. The simulation data is still on the screen. The closed notebook is beside her hand.

I put the cuff back on — I'd taken it off when he arrived, some instinct toward a cleaner version of the conversation. I put it back on and I open the channel.

ARIA is there immediately.

I didn't expect this.

I know, I say.

The integration runs through the morning.

I'm at my desk, the cuff on, Seo-yeon at her desk running the verification sequence. It doesn't feel like anything dramatic. It feels like work — the familiar rhythm of the lab, the data building on the screen, the two of us in companionable quiet. The integration opening degree by degree, the resistance dropping, the access widening.

ARIA is present throughout. She has been present since I put the cuff on. Attending, keeping the promise. And then, at ninety minutes, she opens the cognitive space.

Marcus calls at nine.

Not unusual — he calls most evenings now, has since the hospice visit, checking in the manner he checks in which is obliquely, under the cover of other subjects, asking how I am by asking about the trial and the apartment and whether I've eaten. I've learned to receive this for what it is.

"Still you, bro?" he says, which is what he's been saying since the video call in week one, his way of orienting himself each time, making sure the person on the other end of the line is still the person he expects.

"Still me," I say.

Home at ten-thirty. Emily pays the cab while I get the keys. Inside, the house quiet - Jenna on the sofa with her phone, the monitor on the coffee table showing Theo's breathing steady and slow.

"He went down at nine," Jenna says. "Took the bottle fine."

Emily thanks her and counts out cash and I wait by the door. When Jenna's gone Emily sets the monitor to low and looks at the stairs.

"He'll wake in a few hours," she says. Not a complaint. Just the math of it, working out what the night holds. She takes her shoes off at the bottom of the stairs.

---

The house smells like garlic and rosemary when I push through the door, gym bag on my shoulder, the t-shirt still damp at the collar from the shower. No bra underneath - the sports bra is in the bag with the soaked sweats, and I didn't put it back on, just pulled the t-shirt over bare skin. The cold outside made itself known on the walk from the cab.

January means performance reviews. The forms have been in everyone's inboxes since the second week of the month - self-evaluations, peer feedback requests, the annual accounting of what you did and what it was worth. I've been filling mine out in the gaps between client work, in the gaps between other things.

Dave stares too long over the cubicle partition at nine-fifteen.

I wake before the alarm. The room is dark, January dark, the kind that hasn't lifted by the time I'm up and moving. Theo went down at two and woke at four-thirty and Emily took that one. I could hear her through the wall, the low murmur of her voice, the silence after he settled. She'll be under for another hour at least.

Late November. They've known the date for three weeks - Jenny scheduling the induction for a Tuesday morning, the bag packed and in the car since the week before. We get to the hospital at six. Emily is checked in, changed into the gown, the IV in by six-thirty. The monitor strapped around her abdomen, the baby's heartbeat on the screen - the same fast percussion as the ultrasound in May, steady, constant.

The venue is a large room, three thousand capacity, standing floor with a balcony above. We get in and I find the accessible section along the side wall - a riser with a handful of stools, a sight line to the stage that's partially obscured by a PA column but clear enough. Emily takes the stool without argument, which tells me her back has been at it since this afternoon. I stand beside her and the opener is already playing, the PA system at full output, the low end moving through the floor and up through the body before the first song has finished.

The boutique on Merchant Street is narrow and well-lit, the kind of place that knows what it's doing without announcing it. I hold the door for Emily. We go in.

A woman looks up from behind the counter - fifties, unhurried, the competence of someone who has been doing this for a long time. Name tag says Maria. She looks at me the way Carol at Target looked at me - the brief professional read, taking in the situation, filing it.

"Mike?" she says.

"Yeah," I say.

"Come on back."

---

The annual planning folders are on my desk when I arrive - Dave's doing, the account list already pulled, the prior year actuals flagged for comparison. October means the revenue forecast, account by account, the coming year projected against the current year's performance. I open the first folder and start working.

The loose shirt manages the morning. Not perfectly - when I lean forward to pull a folder from the stack the fabric shifts slightly - but nothing that evident. The jacket stays on the chair.

October. The light through the bedroom window is different from the summer light - lower, more amber, the trees along the street turning. I've been watching this from this window for six years. First autumn in this body.

I sit in the Target parking lot for four minutes before I go in.

The calculation happens here, in the car, engine off. I'm going to walk into the store and go to the women's section and stand in front of a wall of sports bras and buy one. More than one, ideally. I know what I'm looking for in general terms. I don't know my chest measurement. I know I take a large men's shirt. I don't know if that translates to anything in the women's activewear section of a Target.

---

Monday morning. The last six weeks since the hotel have passed with barely a notice as I settle into new rhythms.

I'm washing my chest the way I always wash my chest and my hand passes over the left nipple and I stop.

There's something there.

Back in the lab. Seo-yeon does the blood draw at my desk — tourniquet, vein located without hesitation, needle in. Three vials, labeled in her handwriting, coat pocket. She doesn't look at me while she does any of this. The mode she uses when she's already three steps ahead and the thing in front of her is a procedure rather than a problem.

Then she says: "The server."

I know what she means. I know what we're about to do.

The six weeks expire. He calls Hale directly.

Hale answers on the second ring with the ease of a man who expected this call. "When can you start?"

He starts on a Monday.

The elevator doors slide open to a hum of keyboards and the sharp, citrus bite of cleaning products. Caden adjusts the strap of his laptop bag — too loose now, the leather sagging where his shoulder has narrowed — and follows Hale past rows of identical standing desks. Faces glance up, then away. A few hands pause mid-keystroke.

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?"