I press my hand to my side and breathe through the pain. Monday…I just need to get to Monday.
Akyl
She doesn’t speak in the car. I don’t ask her to.
The drive is forty minutes, through streets that empty as the city folds in on itself for the night. I keep my eyes forward, on the road, on the wet smear of headlights through the windscreen. But I’m watching her in my peripheral vision the way I watch everything I have decided to claim: constantly, without appearing to.
She has her forehead against the window. Her eyes are closed. The midnight blue silk of her dress has wrinkled slightly across her lap, and her left hand rests against her abdomen, not pressing this time, just resting the way a person rests a hand over a wound when they’ve finally stopped pretending it doesn’t exist.
The house is lit when we arrive. Kasimir, my housekeeper who has been with my family in one way or another for nineteen years, has never once asked me a question he didn’t need the answer to. When I called ahead from the broker’s study, I gave him a list.
I get out of the car and open her door. She looks up at me with those grey-green eyes, exhausted in a way that’s gone past tired and settled into her bones. Like her body’s been running on empty so long it’s forgotten what rest even is.
“I can walk,” she says.
“I know.” I offer her my hand anyway, and she takes it after a pause. She lets me take most of her weight as she steps out of the car, and I feel her exhale as her feet touch the ground, a controlled breath that she releases slowly, managing the transition of movement.
Inside, the house is warm. The entrance hall is lit with low, amber lighting.
Katriona looks at the space with the same expression she had at the dinner: measuring, calibrating, assessing what she’s walked into.
“The guest suite is ready,” Kasimir says from the hallway. He is a compact, grey-haired man who moves without making sound. He doesn’t look at Katriona with surprise. If he has opinions about the fact that I have arrived at one in the morning with a woman in a dinner dress and instructions about a bath and light food, he keeps them to himself.
“The bath first,” I say. “Then food.”
Katriona turns to me. Her expression is careful, guarded, looking for conditions. “You don’t have to—”
“I know I don’t have to.”
She doesn’t argue further. That tells me something important. Beneath the composure and the careful negotiation and the dry, precise wit, she is running on empty tonight. The performance has cost her, and she is too tired to refuse help she genuinely needs.
I take her up myself. The guest suite is on the second floor, at the end of the hall, with windows that face the garden rather than the street. I chose this room because it’s quiet, because the morning light doesn’t reach it until late, and because the bathroom has a deep, freestanding tub.
The bathroom is warm. Kasimir has run the bath already, the water deep and steaming, with something that smells faintly of eucalyptus and lavender. On the marble counter, he has laid out a robe, thick and white and fluffy. Beside it, a small glass of water and two white tablets in a dish.
Katriona sees the tablets and goes still.
“Naproxen,” I say. “Anti-inflammatory. I checked your file on the drive over. Your current prescription is the same. I have it.”
She is looking at the dish as though it is something she can’t quite identify. Something she has seen described before but never encountered in person.
“How long has it been since you had a full dose?” I ask.
A pause. “Three days. I was rationing them. I only had fourteen left and I didn’t know…” She stops. Swallows. “I didn’t know how long I’d need them to last.”
The rage that has been sitting in my chest since I read her medical file tightens, but I keep it off my face. This isn’t the moment for my anger. This is her moment, and what she needs from me right now is not fury on her behalf. She has had enough of her suffering reflected back at her. What she needs is the opposite: someone who sees it clearly and moves through it toward a solution.
“You’re not rationing anything anymore.” I say it plainly. “Take the dose now, with food when it’s ready. There’s a heat pad in the top drawer of the cabinet under the sink. The bath will help with the muscle spasms.”
She finally looks at me. “You researched endometriosis on the drive over…?”
“I started in the study, after I read your file. The drive gave me more time.”
“Most people don’t know anything about it.” She says it without accusation. Just the flat, factual delivery of someone cataloguing evidence. “Most people hear ‘women’s issues’ and their eyes glaze before I’ve finished the first sentence.”
“I’m not most people.”
“No.” She looks at the bath, the robe, the tablets in the dish. “You’re really not.”
