Her mother lived forty minutes north, in the same split-level Lea had grown up in, with the same plastic-covered runner on the stairs and the same ceramic nativity on the hall table that had lost a shepherd in 1996. Dana and her husband and the two boys would be there by noon. Lea had said, on the phone, that she’d come for lunch and stay through dinner.

At 6:30 on Christmas morning the app woke her.

Rear module: insert and dock by 07:30.

She lay in Abby’s bed and looked at it. Abby was asleep beside her, or appeared to be — one arm flung over her face, her breathing slow. Lea’s wrists were cuffed to the tether. She lay there until 6:45, waiting for Abby to wake and unclip her, and Abby didn’t, and at 6:52 the app sent a second notification — Reminder: 38 minutes remaining — and Lea said, very quietly, “Abby.”

Abby moved her arm. One eye opened.

“I can’t reach it,” Lea said. “I’m still—” She lifted her cuffed hands an inch.

“I know.” Abby yawned and reached over and unclipped the tether and let her arm drop back over her face. “Merry Christmas. Go.”

She inserted it herself, in Abby’s bathroom, standing at the sink with one foot up on the edge of the tub, the way she had done perhaps thirty times now. It never got easier. It was a thing she had to do to herself, with her own hands, alone, in the quiet — no Abby to bend her over, no straps to blame — and every time there was the same long moment with the cool tapered tip pressed against her, and her own hand holding it there, when she could simply not. When nothing in the room was making her. And every time she breathed out, and pushed, and felt herself open around it, slowly, and heard the soft tick as the base seated into the keeper, and the app chimed — Docked. 07:04. — and it was done, and it had been her.

She dressed for her mother’s. A dark green wrap dress, because her mother liked her in color. Tights. Boots. The fine chain with its tiny padlock lay at the hollow of her throat. She put her hair up and looked at herself in the mirror and thought: I look like a woman going to her mother’s for Christmas.

The plug shifted inside her as she turned away from the mirror, and she put a hand on the sink.

Abby drove her. That hadn’t been discussed, but at 11:15 Abby came downstairs with her keys and her coat and said, “Ready?” and Lea was. They didn’t talk much on the highway. The day was grey and dry and the fields beyond the exits were bare and brown, and Lea sat with her hands in her lap and felt the plug with every bump in the road.

At the end of her mother’s street, Abby pulled over.

“I’ll be back at seven,” she said. “Have a nice time. Give your mother my love.”

“You’re not—” Lea stopped. She didn’t know what she’d been going to say. Coming in? Abby had never come in. Abby had met her mother exactly twice in six years — at Lea’s wedding, and at her father’s funeral. “Okay.”

“One thing.” Abby reached over and tucked a strand of hair behind Lea’s ear, and her fingers lingered against the chain at Lea’s throat. “The app’s on a holiday schedule today. Release requests will be reviewed between seven and seven-fifteen p.m. I’d plan your fluids around that.” A small smile. “Merry Christmas.”

Lea stared at her.

“That’s eight hours,” she said.

“It’s seven hours and forty-five minutes. You’ll manage.” Abby leaned across her and opened the passenger door. “Go on. Your nephews are watching from the window.”

They were. Two small faces at the front window, fogging the glass. Lea got out of the car.

It was, for the first hour, almost ordinary. That was how it got her.

Her mother hugged her for a long time in the hall and said she looked thin, and then said she looked well, and then said she looked different, and Lea said it was the new job, and her mother said she’d always said Lea worked too hard at that firm, and Lea agreed that she had. The boys wanted to show her a game. Dana’s husband, Rob, handed her a mug of mulled wine and told her about his knee surgery. The house smelled of turkey and pine and her mother’s perfume, the same perfume, forty years, and Lea sat on the plaid couch in the den where she had watched cartoons and opened presents and lost her virginity — Kevin Dunne, junior year, while her parents were at a wedding — and held the mulled wine and let it all wash over her and thought, this is fine. This is fine. I can do this.

She drank half the mulled wine before she realized what she was doing, and put it down, and didn’t touch it again.

At 1:40 she felt the first faint pressure, and ignored it.

At 2:15, over the turkey, she found herself doing the arithmetic. Five hours. Fluids. She’d had coffee at seven. The wine. A glass of water when she arrived, because her mother had pressed it on her. She pushed her own water glass an inch away from her plate and her mother said, “You’re not drinking anything, honey,” and Lea said she was fine, and her mother said, “You always say that,” and Dana looked up from cutting the younger boy’s turkey and looked at Lea for a second longer than she needed to.

At 3:30 she went upstairs to the bathroom — the pink-tiled one with the seashell soaps nobody was allowed to use — and locked the door and sat on the closed lid of the toilet with her phone.

Request release — rear module.
Holiday schedule active. Requests reviewed 19:00–19:15. Your request has been queued.

She knew it would say that. She’d known. She pressed it anyway, the way you press an elevator button that’s already lit. Then she typed in the reason field, I’m at my mother’s. Please. I’m in her bathroom. and sent it, and watched it sit there. Queued.

She sat on the toilet lid with her knees pressed together — at least she could do that, today; the bar had been off for twelve days, though the bands were there under her tights, cool and hard against the insides of her thighs whenever her knees came together — and her hands pressed between her knees, and looked at the pink tile, at the seashell soaps, at the framed cross-stitch over the towel rail that said BLESS THIS HOME in her grandmother’s stitches, and the plug sat inside her, docked, immovable, and the pressure in her belly sat there with it, and she understood that she was going to sit at her mother’s Christmas table for three and a half more hours and smile and pass the potatoes with her body clenched around a locked piece of steel that only one person on earth could release, and that person was forty minutes away, and had planned this, and had told her to give her mother her love.

Nobody here knows, she thought. Nobody in this house has the faintest idea.

She waited for that to be a relief. It wasn’t. It was the Daniel thought again, the closed door, the house he was admiring — except this was her house. This was her mother’s bathroom, her grandmother’s stitches, the room where she’d cried when she didn’t get into Yale. And she was the closed door in it. There was a whole other woman sitting here on this toilet lid, and none of the people downstairs who had loved her for thirty-seven years could see her at all.

There was a knock.

“Lea?” Dana. “You okay in there?”

“Fine.” Too fast. “I’m fine. Out in a sec.”

A pause outside the door.

“Okay,” Dana said. Then, lower: “Can I come in?”

Lea’s heart went into her throat. No. “Sure,” she said, and stood, and unlocked the door, because there was no version of saying no that wouldn’t be worse.

Dana came in and shut the door behind her and leaned against it. She was two years older than Lea and three inches shorter and had their father’s eyes, and she looked at Lea now with them, steady and worried.

“What’s going on with you?”

“Nothing. Work.”

“Lea.” Dana folded her arms. “You haven’t called Mom since October. You skipped Thanksgiving. You quit a job you’ve been killing yourself for since law school and nobody even knew until Mom read it on LinkedIn. You haven’t drunk anything all day, you keep looking at your phone like it’s going to bite you, and you’ve got—” She gestured at Lea’s throat. “What is that? You don’t wear jewelry. You’ve never worn jewelry. You told me at my wedding it made you feel like you were being strangled.”

Lea’s hand went to the chain. She could feel the tiny padlock under her fingertip.

“It was a gift,” she said.

“From who?”

Lea didn’t answer.

“Is it Abby?” Dana said, and Lea’s face must have done something, because Dana’s own face changed — softened, and then sharpened, all at once. “It’s Abby. Oh my God. Are you — are you two—?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Okay. Okay, that’s — honestly, Lea, that’s fine, that’s great, if you’re — I don’t care who it is, I just—” Dana took a breath. “You look like you haven’t slept in a month. You look like you’re—” She stopped, searching for it. “Scared. You look scared, Lea. Is she—” Her voice dropped further. “Is she good to you?”

And there it was. The question. Has she once asked you what you want? Dana was asking. Right now, in the pink bathroom, Dana was asking her, with their father’s eyes, exactly the thing Abby had said she’d never ask.

Lea opened her mouth.

The plug moved.

It wasn’t the swell. It was the thrum — low, slow, the cello string, one long deep pull from inside her that went up her spine and forward into the shield, and it lasted three seconds, and it stopped. It was nothing. A notification. A tap on the shoulder from forty miles away.

It wasn’t random. The app had never once moved the plug on its own. Only Abby did that.

She’s watching. Of course she was. The moment Dana asked, Lea’s pulse had gone through the roof — and forty miles away, in that big glass kitchen, Abby would have seen the spike on her phone and known, exactly, from the shape of the line, that someone was asking Lea a question that mattered. So she’d sent one pulse. Three seconds. Not a punishment. A reminder: I’m here. I can reach you. Be careful what you say. And Lea had heard it. She’d been answered before she could answer.

Lea closed her mouth. Her eyes were stinging.

“She’s good to me,” she said.

Dana looked at her for a long time.

“Okay,” she said finally, in a voice that didn’t believe it at all, and opened the bathroom door, and went back downstairs.

Lea didn’t remember much of the rest of the afternoon. Pie. The boys’ new game. Her mother asleep in her chair by five, the way she always was. Rob watching football. Dana not looking at her, very carefully, every time Lea came into a room.

By six the pressure in her belly was a constant ache and she was sitting very straight on the plaid couch with her thighs locked together, breathing carefully through her nose, counting. By 6:45 she had stopped being able to follow the football. At 6:58 she was in the pink bathroom again, sitting on the lid with the phone in both hands, watching the clock.

19:00.

Request queued. Review in progress.

19:04. 19:07. 19:09.

Please, she typed. Please. It’s after seven.

Review in progress.

She was rocking slightly, forward and back, without meaning to. She noticed that the way she noticed everything now: from the outside, with a cold, clinical interest that did nothing to stop it. You’re rocking. You’re in your mother’s bathroom on Christmas Day rocking back and forth on the toilet lid begging a phone. Look at you.

19:13. Two minutes left in the window.

Lea Abby please. I’m begging you. Please. I’ll do anything. Please let me.

19:14.

Request approved. Rear module released. Re-insert and dock by 19:45.

Then, beneath it, a message from Abby: Outside. Take your time.

In the car, on the highway, in the dark, neither of them spoke for the first ten minutes. The plug was back in. Docked by 19:41, in her mother’s bathroom, with her hands shaking so badly it had taken three tries. She’d said goodbye to everyone in the hall. Her mother had held her too long again. Dana had hugged her quickly, hard, and said into her ear, Call me. I mean it. Any time, and Lea had said she would.

“Your sister asked you something,” Abby said eventually. Not a question.

“Yes.”

“In the bathroom. Three-fifty.” Abby’s eyes stayed on the road. “Your heart rate went to a hundred and nineteen. That’s not a bathroom heart rate.”

“She asked if you were good to me.”

The tires hummed. A truck passed them, lit up like a ship.

“And what did you say?”

Lea looked out at the dark fields.

“You know what I said. You answered for me.”

“I tapped you. Once. Three seconds.” Abby’s voice was mild. “You did the answering. I just reminded you who you’d be answering about.” A pause. “What would you have said, if I hadn’t?”

Lea opened her mouth to say I don’t know and found that she did know, and that it was worse than not knowing.

She would have said yes. Without the tap. She’d have said yes, she’s good to me, and meant it — and then she’d have had to explain what good meant, to Dana, in the pink bathroom, with the plug docked inside her and the chain locked at her throat, and she’d have found that there were no words in her sister’s language for it. That every true sentence would have sounded, in Dana’s ears, like a woman describing a hostage situation. So she’d have stopped. And Dana would have looked at her exactly the way she had.

The tap hadn’t changed her answer. It had only saved her from finding out that there was no way to give it.

“I’d have said yes,” Lea said.

“I know.” Abby reached over without looking and put her hand on Lea’s knee and left it there, warm and heavy, for the rest of the drive. “That’s why I tapped. So you wouldn’t have to hear yourself try to explain it.”

It was, Lea thought, the kindest thing Abby had done for her in weeks. She held on to that thought all the way home, and did not examine it, because she was afraid of what she’d find if she did.

HALO BIOMETRIC — PARTICIPANT NOTES (PRIVATE)

Subject: L.
Day: 21 (cycle 2).
Entry by: A.M.

Christmas. Mother: 7h 40m. Sister: one direct question, 15:50, bathroom. HR 119. One haptic tap (3 s). Subject answered “She’s good to me.” Sister did not believe her. Good. Sister now believes something is wrong and cannot name it, and Lea knows her sister believes it, and cannot correct her. That gap does more than any distance I could have engineered.

Release requests: 4, then 6 in the final 15 min. Approved at 19:14. One minute before the window closed. She will remember the minute.

In the car, said she would have said yes without the tap. True. Told her the tap was to spare her hearing herself explain it. Also true. She took it as kindness. It was. It was also the last bridge back to her sister, and she just watched me burn it and thanked me for the warmth.

Hand on her knee 31 minutes. HR dropped from 97 to 71. Fastest descent I’ve recorded. Note: physical contact is now a tool of the first order. Ration it.

Anand: Jan 9.