Chapter 13

Tuesday again.

Kiya drove herself. She had taken to driving herself on Tuesdays. Mara had stopped questioning it. They met at the hospice the way coworkers met at the same building from different commutes, and Mara went to the cafeteria with her book, which was a different book now—she had finished the French one and had picked up a memoir about a woman who had walked across Spain after her husband died. Mara was thirty pages in. She was finding the woman in the book irritating in a specific way that made the book hard to put down.

Kiya parked in the visitor lot. The black envelope was in her tote on her shoulder, completed, every item marked, the circles drawn where the items had taken her under.

She had finished the list on Friday and had spent the weekend not opening it. She had wanted the document to settle in its final form before she handed it across.

Caroline was at the nurses’ station when Kiya came up.

“She is having a good morning. She has been asking when you would get here.”

“Up for working?”

“She thinks so. Go on in.”

Stephanie had on a different scarf, a deeper red, and the color did something kind to her face. The yellowing was still there underneath. The eyes were sharper today than they had been Thursday.

“Show me.”

Kiya took the envelope out and laid it on the blanket. Stephanie put the glasses on. She did not begin reading items. She lifted the pages and looked at the shape of the marks down the right-hand column, the asterisks, the circles in the margin. She was reading the document before reading it.

“You did circles.”

“Yes.”

“How many.”

“Nine. Maybe ten.”

“Good. That is the right number.”

She turned to the first page.

“Verbal protocols. All yes. Tell me how it felt in your body.”

“Tight. Low. Like reading the design of something I had been wanting and had not been able to draw.”

Stephanie nodded without looking up.

“That is the tone of the document. Move on. Verbal degradation. You held your line from the first list. Lecturing at your feet, yes, circled. Tell me the circle.”

“The flinch was the shame of being asked, not the shame of wanting. I do not want to be lectured at his feet. I also do not want to refuse it. He may need to put his disappointment somewhere sometimes, and I would rather be the place he puts it than have him put it elsewhere.”

Stephanie’s eyes did not move from her face for a moment.

“You have understood that some of what he will do with you is for him, not for you. Most slaves take a year to understand that. Hold the mark.”

She turned the page. She read several items in silence.

“Body display, public-facing. You distinguished between a secret collar and an obvious one.”

“Something he gave me that reads as jewelry to the world and as a collar to us. I want that. The obvious collar in vanilla settings I am not willing for.”