Dr. Anand was not what Lea had expected, and Lea was beginning to understand that this was a pattern: that everything Abby brought into her life would be calmer, kinder, and more competent than whatever her imagination had prepared her for, and that this was precisely what made it unbearable.

She was in her late fifties. Small, silver-haired, in a soft grey sweater and reading glasses on a cord. She came to the house on a Friday evening in January with a doctor’s bag and a rolling hard case, and shook Lea’s hand in the front hall — a warm dry grip, two pumps — and said, “Lea. I’ve read your file. I’m very glad to finally meet you,” in a voice that suggested she had read a great deal of it, and that none of it had surprised her.

“My file,” Lea repeated.

“Sleep, nutrition, cardiac, cycle. Abby’s very thorough.” Dr. Anand smiled. “Your resting heart rate concerns me a little. We’ll talk about it. Shall we go through?”

She knew where the back room was. She walked there ahead of them, down the hall, past the bedroom, and put her own thumb to the pad by the door. It clicked. She went in.

Lea stood in the hall and looked at Abby.

“She’s been here before,” Lea said.

“She designed it,” said Abby. “Go in.”

Inside, Dr. Anand had already opened her case on the steel tray and was laying things out in a row: a stethoscope, a blood-pressure cuff, a tape measure, calipers, a small ultrasound wand on a cable, a speculum in a sterile pouch, gloves. She did it without hurry, the way Abby did things. The amber lamp was on. The fern. The table under its hard white light.

“Clothes on the chair, please,” Dr. Anand said, without looking up. “Everything. Abby, could you get the shield?”

Lea undressed. She folded her clothes onto the small wooden chair by the door, as she always did, because doing something ordinary with her hands still helped, a little. She stood on the rug naked except for the chain at her throat and the shield, and Abby crouched and unlocked it — the click, the second click — and lifted it away, and the plug came with it, released from its keeper, and Abby set them both on the tray beside the speculum as if they were more instruments.

The air hit her. It always did. She had stopped being able to stop her hips from moving when it did.

Dr. Anand glanced over, once, from the tray. A clinician’s glance. It took in Lea’s body — the flush, the swelling, the wetness she could feel on her own inner thighs — and moved on without the faintest change of expression.

“On the table, please. On your back.”

Lea climbed onto it. The leather was cool. The hard light was in her eyes.

“I’m going to secure you,” Dr. Anand said. “Some of what I’m doing tonight requires you to be completely still, and in my experience patients find it easier when they don’t have to hold themselves still by effort. It’s not a punishment. It’s a courtesy.” She looked at Lea over her glasses. “Is that all right?”

It was the first time anyone had ever asked. Abby had asked too tight? — never is that all right? Lea looked past Dr. Anand at Abby, who was leaning against the cabinet with her arms folded, watching, and Abby gave her nothing. Not a nod. Not a frown.

She’s asking you, said the deposition voice. A physician. A third party. You could say no. She’d respect it. That’s what the question means.

“Yes,” Lea said.

The straps went on. Not all of them — Dr. Anand did ankles, thighs, waist, wrists, and left Lea’s upper body and head free. She was quick and gentle and checked each one with two fingers, exactly as Abby did, and Lea wondered with a lurch which of them had learned it from the other.

It started like any physical. That was its own small cruelty.

Blood pressure, the cuff squeezing her arm. One forty-two over ninety. Hm. Stethoscope on her chest, cold, then on her back as Dr. Anand helped her lift her shoulders. Breathe in. Out. Again. A light in her eyes. A tongue depressor.

“Stick your tongue out for me. All the way. Hold it.”

Lea did. Dr. Anand held the depressor flat under it and looked for a long time, angling the light, and then — with a gloved finger — lifted the tip of Lea’s tongue and looked underneath. She pressed, lightly, at a point in the center. Then took the calipers from the tray and measured something.

“Good,” she said, to herself, and wrote on a tablet. “Twelve millimetres is plenty. Thank you, you can relax.”

Lea pulled her tongue back in. “Twelve millimetres of what?”

Dr. Anand looked at Abby.

“She doesn’t ask,” Abby said.

“Ah.” Dr. Anand turned back to Lea and her face held something that might, in another context, have been sympathy. “Then I’m afraid I can’t tell you, Lea. It’s not my information to give. I’m sorry.”

It’s not my information to give. Lea lay strapped to the table and turned the sentence over. It was exactly what she would have said — had said, a hundred times, to opposing counsel asking about a client’s intentions. I’m not in a position to disclose that. It was a lawyer’s sentence. It was correct. It was courteous. It meant: you are not the client here.

Then her breasts. Dr. Anand cupped each one in a gloved hand and examined it with the flat, practised thoroughness of a mammogram tech, fingers circling, pressing. Lea stared at the ceiling. Then the doctor took her right nipple between thumb and forefinger and rolled it, gently, until it stood hard — and Lea’s whole body jerked against the waist strap and she bit back a sound — and Dr. Anand held it there, erect, and laid the calipers across its base, horizontally, and read the measurement, and did the same to the left.

“Fourteen,” she said to the tablet. “Both sides. Symmetrical. Lovely.”

Lovely. Lea’s face was burning. Her nipples ached where they’d been rolled. Fourteen millimetres. Horizontally. Across the base. She did not need to ask what that measurement was for. Anyone who’d ever been in a changing room knew what it was for. She lay there with the knowledge and Abby’s rule pressing down on her mouth like a hand, and said nothing.

So it’s that, she thought. Piercings. And the relief was so sudden and so enormous that it was almost funny. Only that. Women do that every day. Women do it at the mall. Was that what she had been lying awake over for a month? Was that the second product, it doesn’t come off — a pair of nipple rings? She almost laughed. She almost said it out loud. Abby, is that all—

Dr. Anand moved to the foot of the table, and pressed the pedal, and the leg sections swung slowly apart.

The exam went on for a long time. Lea would remember it afterward the way she remembered the Hadley closing — as a series of moments with blankness between them, as if her mind had kept leaving the room and coming back.

Dr. Anand’s gloved fingers spreading her labia, one side, then the other, holding each lip out between thumb and finger and looking, measuring, the calipers cool against the thin skin. Inner labia, good thickness. Mid-point, eight millimetres from the edge, either side. The words meant nothing and also meant exactly what they sounded like.

Then her clit. The doctor drew the hood back with one fingertip and Lea’s back arched off the table so hard the waist strap creaked, because nobody had touched her clit with bare intention since the night of the release — only the ridge, only the cloth, only the indifferent pressure — and here was a fingertip, deliberate, holding her hood back so that the cool air of the room lay directly on the exposed glans, and Dr. Anand bent close and looked.

“Easy,” she murmured. “Breathe. I know.” She didn’t stop. She pinched, very gently, the base of the hood between two fingers, behind the clit, feeling for something, rolling the tissue — and Lea made a high, thin, broken noise she’d never made in front of a stranger — and the doctor said, still to the tablet, “Good depth behind the shaft. Triangle’s viable. Very good anatomy for it, actually.”

Triangle. Lea had no idea what that meant. She would look it up, later, in bed, on her phone, under the duvet, and lie there for an hour afterward with her heart pounding.

Then the speculum. Cold, and then the slow, mechanical, ratcheting spread, and Lea’s eyes squeezed shut, and Dr. Anand’s light inside her, and her voice, conversational: “Lubrication’s excellent. Has been for some time, I’d imagine.” To Abby, not to her.

“Since September,” said Abby.

Then Abby came off the cabinet with something in her hands, and Lea didn’t understand it until it was over her ears.

Headphones. Big, soft, over-ear, the cushions sealing against the sides of her head — and inside them, the moment they settled, a hiss. White noise. Soft and even and total, like rain on a roof very far away, like the sea in a shell. The room vanished. The music, the hum of the lamp, the doctor’s breathing, her own pulse — gone, all of it, poured over and drowned.

“Abby—” She couldn’t hear her own voice. She felt it in her throat and jaw and heard nothing but the hiss.

Abby smiled down at her and patted the side of the headphones, once, the way you’d pat a horse, and turned back to the screen.

Then the ultrasound wand. It was slim and sheathed and warm with gel, and the doctor slid it in alongside the speculum, deep, deeper than the insert went, deeper than anything had gone, and angled it, slowly, while she watched the screen on her tablet. Lea couldn’t see the screen. She could see Dr. Anand’s face, lit grey-blue from below, intent. Abby was standing beside her now, looking at the screen too.

And they were talking.

Lea could see it. Their mouths moving. Dr. Anand’s lips forming something short and satisfied; Abby answering; the doctor nodding. Abby leaning in and pointing at the screen, and saying something, and both of them looking down at Lea’s spread body, and then back at the screen. Lea heard none of it. Only the rain on the roof.

“There,” Dr. Anand said. “See the fornix? Good space. Good tone. The platform will sit well here.” She moved the wand a fraction, and Lea, under the hiss, felt it — very deep, a pressure somewhere she had not known she could feel pressure — and made a sound she couldn’t hear. “I’d go with the forty-millimetre. Possibly forty-two. We’ll size on the day.”

“Forty,” said Abby. “She’s small.”

“Forty, then.” The doctor tapped the tablet. “And it’ll pick up the peripherals from here? All of them?”

“All five. Priya’s run the numbers.” Abby was looking at Lea’s face, not the screen. “Passive until March. She won’t feel it doing anything. She’ll just feel it there.”

“She’ll feel it there,” Anand agreed, mildly. “Every day. It’s a lot to carry without knowing what it is.”

“That’s rather the point.”

Lea watched their mouths. She watched Abby say a sentence that ended with Abby looking straight at her. She watched the doctor’s eyebrows go up very slightly, and come down. She watched them agree about something — about her, about the inside of her — the way two people at a dinner table agree about a wine. And she couldn’t hear a single word. Only the sea in the shell.

The relief of only piercings went out of her like a tide.

Nobody needed an ultrasound for nipple rings. Nobody needed headphones. She lay there with the wand deep in her, touching something she had not known could be touched, and understood that the measurements had not been the whole of it. That there was something else. And that whatever it was, they were discussing it right now, a foot from her face, and had sealed her ears so that she’d watch them do it.

“What are you saying?” she said. She felt the words in her throat and heard only the hiss. She said it louder. “What are you saying? What are you looking at?”

Abby glanced at her. Then, without hurry, she reached down and lifted one cup of the headphones an inch off Lea’s ear. The room came back in a rush — the strings, the lamp, the doctor’s breathing.

“Sorry?” Abby said pleasantly. “I didn’t catch that.”

“What are you looking at?” Lea’s voice was shaking. “Abby. What’s she measuring — there’s nothing there, you can’t pierce there, what are you—”

“Lea,” Abby said.

“I need to know what’s going inside me. I’m strapped to a table, I have a speculum in me, I think I’m entitled to know what—”

“That’s three times,” said Abby.

Lea stopped.

Dr. Anand had gone very still, the wand motionless inside her. She did not look at Lea. She did not look at Abby either. She looked at the screen with the polite, total absorption of a guest at a dinner party when the hosts begin to argue.

“Three times you’ve asked about it since December,” Abby went on, quietly. “I told you, the second time, that you’d find out what a third time costs.” She looked down at Lea, strapped, spread, with a speculum holding her open and a stranger’s instrument deep inside her. “Would you like to?”

No. Every part of Lea said it at once. The body said it, clenching around the speculum so hard it hurt; the mind said it; the lawyer said it. No. Don’t. Take it back. Say you’re sorry.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“I know you are.” Abby turned to Dr. Anand. “Could you give us a few minutes? There’s coffee in the kitchen.”

“Of course.” The doctor withdrew the ultrasound wand — slowly, smoothly — and the speculum, and peeled off her gloves, and left the room without a word or a glance, and the door closed with its soft, sealed sound.

Abby lifted the headphones off Lea’s head and hung them on the corner of the steel tray, where Lea could see them, still faintly hissing.

Abby went to the cabinet. She took out the bar.

Lea saw it and the noise she made wasn’t a word.

“Two weeks this time,” Abby said, fitting one end into the socket on the inside of Lea’s strapped right band — the small, final sound. “Not one. And Lea—” she swung it across and seated the other end in the left — “you’ll wear it through Monday. Through all of next week. You’ll want to know why that matters, and you’re not allowed to ask, so I’ll tell you this much: next week is going to be very hard. And you’re going to do all of it with your thighs held open.”

She locked the bar home. Then she stood at the head of the table and looked down into Lea’s face, and her voice changed — not softer, exactly. More precise.

“Now listen to me. This part is not a punishment. This part is the truth, and I’m going to tell it to you because I’m always going to tell you this part straight.” She put one hand flat on Lea’s sternum. “On Monday, you are going to begin a series of procedures. Anand will do them. They’ll be done properly, here, by a physician, with real anesthetic and real aftercare. You won’t know in advance how many there are or what each one is. You’ll find out each morning.”

Lea stared up at her.

“Some of what she does can be undone. Rings come out. Holes close.” Abby’s hand stayed where it was. “The last thing can’t be undone by you. It can be undone by a doctor, in a procedure, if you ever say the word. That’s the only way it comes out. So I want you to understand exactly what Brennan means, from Monday on. It doesn’t just mean stop. It means an appointment. It means Anand, on this table, taking it out of you. And it means you and I are finished, and so is the job, and so is all of it, the way Schedule A says.” She paused. “That’s the cost of the exit now. I’m not hiding it. It’s real, and it’s always going to work, and it’s never going to be free.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because you have until Monday to decide whether to say it.” Abby leaned down until her face was very close. “After that it’s still there. It’s always there. But after that it costs a surgeon.”

She straightened. She took a clipboard from the cabinet — of course there was a clipboard — and held it where Lea could see it. One page. Consent to Medical Procedures. Dr. Anand’s letterhead. Lea’s name typed at the top.

Lea read it, strapped to the table, with her eyes. She read it twice. She was very good at reading things.

…a series of cosmetic and device-related procedures, including but not limited to body piercing and associated procedures, the number, nature, and timing of which shall be determined by the attending physician in consultation with…

Including but not limited to. She’d have struck that phrase from any document that crossed her desk. She’d have struck in consultation with. She’d have demanded an exhibit listing every procedure, with dates, risks, alternatives, recovery periods. She’d have told a client, never, ever sign anything with “including but not limited to” in the scope of consent, it means they can do anything they like to you and call it covered.

It means they can do anything they like to you.

Her body clenched on nothing, hard, between the steel bands. She felt it. She felt herself go wetter. She lay there and knew it, and knew Abby could see it, and could not stop it.

“I don’t want to sign that,” she said.

“I know.”

“It’s — Abby, it’s blanket. It’s a blank check. Nobody signs a consent like this, it’s not even—”

“You can say the word instead,” Abby said. “Right now. I’ll unstrap you and Anand will go home and on Monday you’ll be packing.” She waited. “Or you can sign it.”

“With what?” Lea’s voice cracked. “My hands are strapped down.”

Abby unbuckled her right wrist. Just the right. She put the pen in Lea’s hand and held the clipboard where Lea could reach it, at an angle, against her strapped body.

Lea held the pen.

You can say it, said the deposition voice. Right now. Brennan. Two syllables. You’d be home by ten. Your own bed. Your dead plant. You’d call Dana tomorrow and tell her everything and she’d drive down and get you and you’d sit in her kitchen and drink tea and cry. And you’d be fine.

Fine.

She thought about Dana’s kitchen. She thought about the pink bathroom, and Dana’s face, and the question — is she good to you — and the answer she hadn’t been able to give, because there were no words for it in Dana’s language. She thought about explaining this to Dana. The table. The speculum. The fourteen millimetres. The ultrasound, and the silence. She thought about Dana’s face hearing it.

She thought about her own face, in the mirror over the sink, with the open straps behind her.

She signed it. Her hand shook so badly that the pen skidded on the paper and her signature came out as a jagged line with a loop at the start. Worse than the offer letter. The worst yet.

Abby took the clipboard. Looked at the signature. Buckled Lea’s wrist back down.

“Monday,” she said. “Seven a.m. Here.” She went to the door and opened it and called down the hall, pleasantly, “Priti? We’re ready when you are.”

Dr. Anand came back in with her coffee, and put on fresh gloves, and said, “Now, where were we,” and slid the speculum back into Lea as if nothing at all had happened.

HALO BIOMETRIC — PARTICIPANT NOTES (PRIVATE)

Subject: L.
Day: 36 (cycle 2).
Entry by: A.M.

Anand consult. Measurements confirmed. Platform sized by ultrasound: 40 mm. Nothing said aloud in the room. Fitting Mon–Fri as planned.

Anand asked her permission before securing her. First time anyone has. HR spiked on the question, not on the straps. Note: being asked is now more destabilizing to her than being told. Useful. Let Anand keep asking. I won’t.

Third question about the second product, on the table, under speculum. Thigh bands, 14 days, to run through the fitting week. She will spend every procedure with her thighs held apart. She doesn’t know yet how much that will matter on Thursday.

Told her the truth about the exit: after Friday it costs a surgeon. Told her she had until Monday. She signed the consent tonight, strapped, without waiting for Monday. She read it twice. She knew exactly what “including but not limited to” means. Conductance rose on the second read.

She thought, for about four minutes, that it was only piercings. Relief on the trace was enormous. Then the headphones went on, and Anand and I discussed the platform a foot from her face — size, placement, the March plan — while she watched our mouths. I watched the relief drain off the trace in real time. She asked what we were saying. I told her I didn’t catch it.

I’d like that four minutes framed.