Chapter 3

The alarm is a gentle chime, not the blaring siren I used to need. Chloe's phone plays something soft and ambient—harps, or maybe bells, something that sounds like morning in a fairy tale. I fumble for it with a hand that's still not quite mine, or is too mine now, and the screen lights up with a photo of Maya.

Maya at the library, caught mid-laugh, her auburn hair falling out of a messy bun. Chloe took this picture three weeks ago. The memory surfaces easily—Chloe had said something about Dorothea Brooke, and Maya had laughed so hard she'd snorted, and then they'd both dissolved into the kind of helpless giggling that only happens with someone who knows exactly who you are.

I swipe the alarm off and lie still for a moment. The ceiling stars are invisible in the daylight, just pale plastic shapes against white paint. The fairy lights are off. The room is grey with winter morning, and the quilt is warm across my hips, and my hair is a wild tangle on the pillow.

Seven days. I've been Chloe Vance for seven days.

The guilt is there when I reach for it—a low note, the refrigerator hum. It doesn't spike when I swing my legs out of bed and feel the smoothness of my calves brush against each other. It doesn't spike when I catch my reflection in the dark window—curls, dimples, the soft curve of my shoulder where the nightgown strap has slipped. It's just... there. A companion. Something I've learned to carry.

In the kitchen, Ava is already at war with her laptop.

She's wearing the same cream sweater from yesterday—or maybe it's a different cream sweater, she owns about seven of them—and her hair is escaping from its bun in all directions. There's a mug of coffee at her elbow that's long gone cold, a ring of dried foam inside the rim. She doesn't look up when I pad in.

"If one more person tells me to 'trust the process,' I'm going to lose my mind," she says.

"Good morning to you too." Chloe's voice, sweet and slightly high, still catches me off guard in the first few seconds of speech. The body has been talking for twenty years. I've been talking for seven days. The gap is almost gone.

Ava rubs her eyes. "Sorry. Morning. Coffee's..." She glances at the empty pot. "Was fresh. An hour ago. I'll make more."

"Sit. I've got it." The words come out before I think about them—Chloe's instinct, Chloe's care for her sister. I measure the grounds, fill the reservoir, press the button. The body knows where everything is. The body has made coffee in this kitchen a thousand times.

Ava watches me with a tired, grateful smile. "What would I do without you?"

The question is rhetorical. It's also a knife, if I let it be. Seven days ago it would have gutted me. Now I just smile back—Chloe's smile, dimples and all—and say, "You'd survive. You'd just be crankier."

Ava snorts. "True."

The tea shop is called Lavender & Lace, which is exactly the kind of name that would make my old self roll his eyes so hard they'd get stuck. But Chloe loves it—loves the mismatched china, the doilies on the tables, the elderly cat named Wordsworth who sleeps in the front window. The body settles into the corner booth automatically, the one with the faded velvet cushions and the best view of the rainy street.

Maya arrives four minutes late, which is early for her.

She bursts through the door in a rust-colored sweater and an olive corduroy skirt that almost matches mine—we've done this before, shown up accidentally coordinated, and it always makes her laugh. Today she's carrying a tote bag overflowing with books and a look on her face that I recognize from Chloe's memories: stressed, but trying to hide it.

"Sorry, sorry, sorry." She dumps the tote on the bench and leans across the table to hug me—her hair brushing my cheek, sandalwood and vanilla, her arms squeezing my narrower shoulders. The hug lasts exactly as long as Chloe's memories said it would. Three seconds, firm and warm. "Eleanor needed help with the garden this morning and I lost track of time."

"How is Eleanor?" The question comes automatically, drawn from Chloe's genuine affection for Maya's grandmother.

"Stubborn." Maya rolls her eyes, but the fondness underneath is unmistakable. "She insisted on replanting the entire herb bed herself. I told her to wait for me, and she said—" Maya drops her voice into a wavering, papery register— "'My dear, I have been gardening since before your mother was born, I do not require supervision.'"

I laugh. It's Chloe's laugh—bright, a little breathless—but the amusement is mine. "She's going to outlive us all."

"God, I hope so." Maya flags down the waitress and orders for both of us without asking—chai for me, Earl Grey for her, a scone to share. She knows Chloe's order. She's known it for three years. The casual intimacy of it—the way she doesn't even think to ask—settles somewhere in my chest. Warmth and theft, braided together.

The waitress brings our tea. Maya wraps her hands around her cup and stares into the steam for a long moment. I know that look. Chloe's memories supply it: Maya is working up to something.

"Thesis deadline is in six weeks," she says finally. "And I have... forty pages. Out of eighty. And half of them are terrible."

"They're not terrible."

"They're so terrible, Chloe. I used the word 'problematize' three times in one paragraph. Who does that?"

"Academics?"

"Bad academics." She groans and drops her forehead onto her folded arms. "Ben says I should just power through, but Ben is one of those people who's never written a bad sentence in his life. He doesn't understand the struggle."

Ben. Her boyfriend. Steady, kind, slightly boring Ben. Chloe's memories supply his face—tall, brown hair, a perpetually earnest expression. I've never met him. I might never meet him. But I know that Maya loves him, and I know that he loves her, and I know that Chloe has spent hours listening to Maya dissect every aspect of their relationship.

"You could always 'problematize' the concept of problematizing," I offer. "Very meta. Very postmodern."

Maya lifts her head and stares at me. Then she laughs—a real laugh, the one from the photo on my phone. "Oh my god. That's the worst advice anyone has ever given me."

"You're welcome."

She shakes her head, still smiling, and reaches across the table to squeeze my hand. Her fingers are cool from the tea glass, her silver rings pressing tiny circles into my skin. "This is why I need you. You're the only one who can make me laugh when I'm spiraling."

You're the only one who gets this. She doesn't say it, but the sentiment is there, hanging in the air between us. And she's talking to Chloe. She's talking to her best friend, the person who knows her better than anyone except maybe Ben, the person who's been talking her down from ledges since they met at a library book club three years ago.

I'm not that person. But I'm wearing her face. And the warmth of Maya's hand on mine, the casual, unquestioned intimacy of it—this is something my male body never received. Not once. Not in twenty years of being alive.

"You're going to finish the thesis," I say. Chloe's voice, but my words. "You're going to write eighty brilliant pages and your committee is going to love them and you're going to graduate and become the most overqualified bookstore employee in the state."

Maya snorts. "The dream."

"I'm serious. You've been talking about Victorian narrative structure for three years. You know this stuff cold. The only thing stopping you is that you're scared of being done."

She's quiet for a moment. Then she says, softly, "How do you always know exactly what I need to hear?"

Chloe knows. Chloe has always known. It's why they're best friends. It's why Maya trusts her—trusts me—with the vulnerable, scared part of herself that she doesn't show anyone else.

I don't have an answer that isn't a lie. So I just squeeze her hand back and say, "I pay attention."

We talk for two hours. About the thesis, at first, and then about everything else—Maya's grandmother, my term paper, the latest novel we're both reading, whether Mr. Darcy is actually romantic or just rude. Maya argues for romantic; I argue for rude, because Chloe would argue for rude, and the debate is so familiar to both of us—to both of them—that we fall into it like a choreographed dance.

At some point I stop thinking about what Chloe would say. The words just come. The body knows this friendship. The body has been having this conversation for years, and I'm just along for the ride. Or maybe I'm driving now. The line is blurring.

When we finally pack up our books and split the last bite of scone, Maya hugs me again at the door. Longer this time. Tighter.

"Thank you," she says into my hair. "I needed this."

"Me too," I say. And I mean it.

The bookstore shift is uneventful. Jenna is there, still stressed about her paper, still talking a mile a minute about communications theory and how she should have been a marine biologist instead. I shelve books and make change and recommend a novel to a teenager who reminds me of Chloe at sixteen—eager, nervous, hungry for stories.

At home, Ava is in the same position she was in this morning, except the coffee mug has been replaced and the prints on the table have multiplied. She's muttering to herself, rearranging images in sequences that only make sense to her.

"Hey," I say, draping my cardigan over the back of the couch. "You should eat something."

"In a minute."

"You said that this morning."

"I mean it this time."

She doesn't. I make her a sandwich anyway and leave it next to her elbow. She looks up at me with those tired hazel eyes and says, "You're a good sister, you know that?"

The guilt flickers. Just a flicker. Then it settles back into its quiet corner.

"I try," I say.

In my room—Chloe's room, I still correct myself sometimes, but the correction is getting fainter—I lock the door and let the performance drain away.

The fairy lights are on. The quilt is rumpled. The notebooks are piled on the desk, and the closet is open from this morning, a riot of jewel tones spilling out.

I don't know what I'm looking for. Maybe nothing. Maybe just the ritual of it—the way my fingers brush across fabrics, the quiet rustle of hangers sliding. I pull out the burgundy fit-and-flare dress, the one I wore on the first night. I pull out the mustard cardigan. I pull out a forest green sweater I haven't tried yet, and a denim miniskirt, and her grandmother's silk scarf.

The scarf is soft and old, smelling faintly of perfume from another era. I don't tie it like a headband this time. I fold it differently—loose around my neck, the ends trailing down my chest. Something Chloe might not have tried. Something a little more daring.

I put on the burgundy dress. Then I take it off and put on the green sweater with the denim skirt. Then I take that off too and stand in front of the mirror in just my bra and panties—nude lace, burgundy cotton—and look at the body I'm living in.

Soft. Curved. The breasts full and round on a petite frame, the hips wider than my old ones, the waist nipping in between. The dimples when I press my lips together. The wild dark curls, messy from the day. The glasses, slightly crooked.

You're mine, I think at the reflection. You're not, but you are. She's sleeping somewhere in the back of her own mind and I'm the one looking out through her eyes, and I don't want to give this back.

The guilt stirs. I pat it on the head.

Yes, yes. I know. Stealing. Wrong. Very bad.

But the wrongness is part of it now. The wrongness is the spice. I'm a thief and I'm wearing her body and I just spent two hours being a better friend to Maya than I've ever been to anyone as myself, and none of it was real except it was, and both things are true.

I put on the burgundy dress again. The jersey slides over my head, cool and soft, the skirt flaring at my hips. I don't bother with tights. Just the dress and the scarf, tied loose at my throat, and my bare legs against the quilt when I sit on the bed.

The poetry notebooks are stacked on the desk. I pick up the top one—purple ink, her happy pen—and flip to a page near the middle.

a cup of tea between us
steam rising like questions
you don't have to ask

It's about Maya. I know it's about Maya without the memories telling me. The steam, the questions, the quiet understanding that doesn't need words. Chloe loves her. Loved her. The tense is getting complicated.

I close the notebook. The fairy lights cast warm gold across the ceiling. The refrigerator hums through the wall. The body settles into the mattress—the weight of breasts, the spread of hips, the cool air on bare legs.

Seven days. The guilt is a companion now. The body is almost home. Tomorrow I'll wake up and do it all again, and the day after that, and the day after that. The term paper is due eventually. Ava's gallery show is coming. Maya will finish her thesis and graduate and I might be here to see it.

I might be here for all of it.

The thought should terrify me. Instead, it feels like settling into a warm bath—a slow, spreading comfort that I don't want to climb out of.

I lie back on the bed. The stars are invisible on the ceiling, but I know they're there. The dress rustles when I shift. The scarf is soft against my throat.

I close my eyes.