I leave her to the bath. I close the door behind me and stand in the hallway for a moment, listening to the sound of water moving as she steps in, and then the long, quiet exhale of a body finally surrendering to warmth.
I go downstairs to the kitchen.
Kasimir has left things on the counter: a small pot of ginger broth, already simmered, with a lid to keep the heat. Beside it, plain crackers on a board, and a bowl of steamed rice with nothing on it. Gentle things. Settling things. The kind of food that asks nothing of a stomach that has been under siege.
I find a tray and lay it out with a cloth, the bowl, the crackers. I add a second glass of water and a small pot of the peppermint tea that I know, from the forty minutes of research I conducted on my phone while a driver took us through the city, can ease nausea caused by inflammation.
I carry the tray upstairs and knock lightly on the door. There’s a pause long enough to make me wonder if I should knock again, then: “One moment.”
When she opens the door, she is in the robe. Her hair is damp, loose around her shoulders. The midnight blue dress is folded over the back of the chair, and she has found the slippers Kasimir left at the end of the bed. Without the armor of the dinner, without the heels and the silk and the careful posture that managed her pain through performance, she looks younger.She looks like what she is: a twenty-six-year-old woman who is exhausted and hurting and trying very hard not to need anything from anyone.
She looks at the tray. Then at me.
“Ginger broth,” I say. “Rice. Crackers. Peppermint tea. Based on what I read, the nausea is worse when the inflammation spikes. This should help settle things. Eat what you can.”
She sits on the edge of the bed and accepts the tray across her lap. She wraps both hands around the mug of broth first, as though warming them, and I watch her close her eyes for a single, private second before she opens them again.
“Sit with me,” she says. It isn’t quite a request and not quite a command.
I take the chair by the window. The room is quiet, and all the noise of the city beyond the glass is dampened under a dark sky.
She drinks the broth in small, careful sips, eating a cracker between each one.
“The bath helped,” she says, without looking up from the bowl.
“Good.”
A comfortable silence spreads between us, which surprises me. I don’t usually find silence comfortable in the presence of others. Silence in my world is something that fills up with calculation and threat assessment. With Katriona sitting across from me in the lamplight, eating rice and looking out at the dark garden, the silence feels different. It feels inhabited.
“Tell me about the doctors,” I say.
She looks up at me. “Which ones?”
“All of them.” I lean forward, forearms on my knees. “Start from the beginning. How old were you when the symptoms started, and what did they tell you?”
She sets the bowl down and wraps her hands around the tea instead.
“Sixteen,” she says. “The pain started at sixteen. I thought everyone felt like that. I thought I was weak. The first doctor I saw told me periods were uncomfortable and suggested pain relief.” The ghost of something crosses her face. Not bitterness exactly. Something quieter and more practiced. “The second one said the same thing. The third referred me to a gynecologist who had a six-month wait. By the time I got in to see her, I’d missed two weeks of school and been vomiting through the pain for three years and she said…”
She pauses. Sips her tea.
“She said that some women simply experience these things more intensely than others and that I might find relief with hormonal contraception.”
“She masked it.”
“For four years.” The word mask passes between us with weight attached. “I was twenty-three when I finally got a proper diagnosis. By then the adenomyosis had developed, and the endometriosis had spread into the pelvic sidewall. All of it entirely preventable. All of it entirely consistent with what happens when you tell a teenage girl that her pain is normal for long enough that she stops reporting it.”
She says it clinically. I’ve heard this tone before, in men who’ve described violence done to them. The careful, flat recitation of facts. The voice of someone who has processed their suffering into information because information is easier to carry.
“And after the diagnosis?” I ask.
“After the diagnosis, I was referred to a specialist who confirmed surgery was necessary. He gave me the cost. He said waiting was medically inadvisable. Then he gave me a leafletabout payment plans.” She sets the tea down. “I went to every doctor I could reach after that. Three private consultations I couldn’t really afford, just to see if any of them disagreed. They didn’t.”
She goes quiet and I wait it out, knowing one of us will fill the silence and it won’t be me.
“The last one I saw…” she says, trailing off. “Dr. Richard Hale. I was referred through a friend who thought he was reputable.” She pauses again, and the way her face twists tells me this is hard for her. “He was thorough with the examination. Thorough with the consultation. And then thorough in explaining that the surgery would cost sixty-five thousand dollars that I didn’t have, and that his fee could be considerably reduced if we came to an… alternative arrangement.”
With a shrug of resignation, she lifts the mug to her lips and sips the mint tea.
