Chapter 2

The week between visits was longer than a week.

Kiya did not know what to call what had happened in the hospice room. She tried words for it while she lay in bed at night with the ceiling fan turning above her, and none of the words fit. Recognition was too big and too small at the same time. Notice was nothing. Stephanie had looked at her for four seconds, perhaps five, and the look had been a hand placed flat against a door Kiya had not known was a door until it was touched.

She kept replaying the look. She did it in the shower and while she was brushing her teeth and while she was supposed to be reading. Stephanie’s eyes had moved to her and stayed, and the staying had not been the way adults usually stayed on her, which was either to assess her or to find her pretty or to wonder what she was going to do with her life. It had been something else. It had been the way a person looks at another person when they think they may have found a thing they have been looking for.

She saw something.

That was the closest Kiya could get to the words for it.

She saw something and she did not say what.

She did not tell her mother any of this. Her mother had said very little on the drive home and very little in the days after. Her mother was waiting. Kiya understood, in the way daughters understand mothers without being told, that her mother had handed her something in the parking lot and was now standing back to see what she did with it.

What Kiya did with it, mostly, was read.

She did not know what she was looking for when she started. She typed words into her phone late at night with the screen brightness turned all the way down so the light would not show under her bedroom door. Total power exchange. Master and slave relationship. Real D/s. She read essays. She read forum posts. She read the parts that the writers said were the parts that mattered and she read the parts that the writers said were the parts that no one wanted to talk about.

She was not aroused by what she read. That was the first thing she noticed and the thing that surprised her. She had expected, vaguely, to be aroused, because that was what one was supposed to be when one read about this. Instead she felt something steadier and stranger. She felt recognized. The writers were describing, in plain words, an arrangement of being that she had felt the shape of inside herself for years and had not had a vocabulary for. They were describing it as a thing one chose. They were describing it as a thing one was.

She closed her phone at three in the morning and lay on her back and put both hands on her sternum and breathed, and she thought, oh.

Just that. Oh.

Her mother was watching her.

Mara Fredericks was not a watchful woman by nature. She had been raised by a mother who watched, and she had decided early that she would not be that with her own children. She had let Kiya alone, mostly. She had trusted her. Kiya had not given her reasons not to.

But Mara had been watching Kiya since the parking lot.

She watched her at breakfast, when Kiya came down quieter than usual and ate half a piece of toast and pushed the rest around the plate. She watched her in the evenings, when Kiya disappeared into her room earlier than she used to. She watched her on the phone with friends and noticed that Kiya’s friends had stopped calling as often, and that Kiya did not seem to mind.

She had been telling herself, for years, that the quietness in her daughter was just temperament. Kiya had been a serious child. She had been the kind of toddler who watched other toddlers and did not join in until she had decided, on her own schedule, what the game was about. She had been the kind of girl who took instruction from her teachers with a quality of attention that her teachers commented on at parent conferences. Kiya is so focused. Kiya never has to be told twice. Kiya is a pleasure. Mara had nodded and smiled and accepted the compliments and had not let herself think, until now, that the words might mean something other than what teachers usually meant by them.

She had been thinking, in the week since the first visit, about her cousin.

She and Stephanie had grown up two streets apart in the same town. They had been the same age within four months and they had been raised together by their mothers, who had been sisters, and they had spent every summer of their childhoods in each other’s houses. She knew Stephanie better than she knew anyone except her own husband and children. She had known her, growing up, in the way only girls who share a bedroom for two weeks every August can know each other.

Stephanie had been a serious child too.

Mara had not thought of it for years. The memory came back now in pieces while she made coffee or folded laundry or drove to the grocery store. The way Stephanie at nine had wanted to be told the rules of every game before she would play it, and would not play it if the rules were vague. The way Stephanie at twelve had watched the adults at family parties as if she were taking notes she would need later. The way Stephanie at fourteen had had a quality of stillness in her that Mara had envied and had not understood and had eventually stopped noticing because she had become used to it.

The way Stephanie at twenty-two had pulled Mara aside at her own engagement party, in the kitchen of her parents’ house, and had told her—quietly, with her hands wrapped around a glass of wine she was not drinking—that her marriage to Nathan was not going to be like other marriages.

I want to tell you one person and then I am never going to talk about it again. I want it to be you. Can it be you.

It can be me.

You are going to think things. I am asking you not to think them out loud.

All right.

And Stephanie had told her. Standing in their grandmother’s kitchen with the engagement party going on in the next room, her cousin had told her, in plain language, what she had agreed to. Master. Slave. Total power exchange. Mara had stood and listened and her face had not done what her face had wanted to do, because Stephanie had asked her not to think out loud and Mara had loved her enough to honor it.

She had thought a great deal silently, for years. She had thought it was a mistake. She had thought Stephanie was being taken advantage of. She had thought Nathan, whom she had met by then and had cautiously liked, was a different man than he had seemed. She had watched the marriage from the careful distance of a cousin who lived two states away and was not invited into the private chambers of it, and what she had seen, year after year, was Stephanie becoming more herself. Brighter. Steadier. The serious child she had been since age nine, finally housed in a life that suited her.