CHAPTER TWO - Voice Memo, Gate 14

Eleven days earlier. Which is to say: five hundred and seventy-one years later.

"Okay," said Eva. "Okay. Hi. This is — Dr. Raman, this is the homework. You said out loud, so. Out loud."

She had the hood of her sweatshirt up and her back to the window at Gate 14, and the phone held close to her mouth, and she was talking in the flat mutter of a woman who has learned to have private conversations in public places. Beside her a toddler was systematically dismantling a bag of pretzels. Out on the apron, a baggage train went by with a man riding on the back of it like it was a parade float.

"So it's ten days to my birthday and I'm at the airport and I'm doing it. I booked it. I'm going. Astera Cay. Ten days, and my birthday's on the tenth, and I have — okay, I'm going to say the actual plan out loud because you said the whole point is that I stop saying it in code."

She checked, reflexively, over her shoulder. Nobody. She'd been doing that for six years and had more or less stopped noticing she did it.

"The plan is that I'm going to sleep with someone."

A beat. The toddler shrieked with joy. Eva laughed, once, appalled at herself.

"Great. Wonderful. Very brave. Okay."

She pulled her knees up onto the seat.

"And before you say it — yes. I'm aware I've done it before. I've read the file, I was in the room." A pause. "Allegedly."

"Not — someone. That's the thing I want to get right. I don't want a boyfriend. I really, sincerely, do not want a boyfriend, and I need you to believe that isn't damage talking, or — it's partly damage talking, obviously, everything I say is partly damage talking, that's why you have a house. But not only."

She turned her face toward the window. The light was that flat grey airport light that makes everyone look like they're being processed.

"I'm going to pick someone beautiful who I will never see again. Someone who is not going to know my last name or where I live or what I do for a living or any of it. And I'm going to have exactly as much of him as I want, and then I'm going to get on a plane."

She stopped. Started again, and her voice had changed.

"Because here's what I worked out. Somewhere around session forty. Do you remember? You didn't say anything for like a full minute, which by the way I hated."

She was twenty-four years old and nine days, and she had been to bed with exactly one person in her life, and she had not been present for a single minute of it.

That was the part nobody had a word for, and it had taken Eva five years and a great deal of money to find one.

It had not been violent. She wanted that on the record, she wanted it on the record with a notary, because every time she had tried to describe it to anyone they had reached immediately for a worse story and she had spent the rest of the conversation correcting them. Marcus had never held her down. He had never once ignored a no. He had, in fact, asked — he had asked every single time, in a nice voice, and she had said yes every single time, and if you wrote the whole two years out on paper there would not be one line in it that a lawyer could do anything with.

She had simply gone away.

It had started around the second month, and she had found she was extremely good at it. Some part of her would get up off the bed and go and stand somewhere near the ceiling, and it would wait there, patiently, with its hands folded, and then when it was over it would come back down and get into the shower. It had not been unpleasant. That was the horror of it, the thing she could not get anyone to understand: it had not been unpleasant at all. It had been like being read to in a language she didn't speak.

She had never made a sound in two years. He'd thought that was shyness. He'd found it endearing, and said so, twice.

And she had never once — not one single time, in two years, with another human being in the room — got anywhere near the end of it.

So when the conservator named Paul with the soft hands and the beautiful Belfast accent waited nine months and never made it a debt, and finally, kindly, asked, Eva had gone home alone and sat on her own kitchen floor at two in the morning with her back against the cabinet, because she had known exactly what she would do if she said yes. She would go up to the ceiling. She would do it to a good man this time, and she would have to watch herself do it.

The problem wasn't that she didn't want it. God, the problem wasn't that.

The problem was the arithmetic.

Her father had taught her the arithmetic. He didn't sit her down and do it — you never got sat down — but it was in the house the way damp is in a house. Her mother gave. Her mother gave and gave and gave, and the giving was the only currency she had, and every year there was less of her, until there was a woman of forty-one who apologised to furniture. Eva had watched her hand herself over in instalments, and Eva had understood, at about eleven, in a kitchen with yellow cabinets, that this was what love was: a slow transfer of assets from one person to another, ending in bankruptcy.

And then, because the universe likes a joke, she had gone out at eighteen and found Marcus, who was nothing like her father, who was funny, who cried at films, who had been so careful with her that for the first year she thought she'd escaped.

Marcus, who put a tracking app on her phone and called it a safety thing. Marcus, who read her texts in front of her, as a joke, until it wasn't a joke and he didn't need to read them in front of her. Marcus, who never once hit her, not one single time, and used that as the proof that he was good — I've never laid a hand on you, Eva — while he stood between her and a door and talked for four hours until she agreed with him about what she had meant when she said the thing she hadn't said.

Marcus who said, when she finally left: I'm only like this because I love you. Do you get that? Nobody else is going to love you this much.

And the terrible thing, the thing she had only been able to say out loud in a beige room in year five, was that she had believed him. Not about the love. About the amount. She had genuinely believed that this was the going rate, that this was what the transaction cost, and that she had simply found the one man willing to pay it.

So she closed the account. Twenty years old, four locks on a rented door, and a rule: nothing gets handed over. Not a key, not a password, not a Tuesday evening, and absolutely not her body — not again, not until she could work out how to be in the room for it. Because the going-away had not stopped when Marcus did. She had tested it twice at twenty-one, clinically, with two perfectly nice men, and both times she had watched the entire thing from somewhere up near the light fitting and come back down and been very gracious about it, and after the second one she had gone home and been sick.

So she stopped. Four years and eleven months at the airport, and counting. She kept it beautifully. She built a whole life inside it — a good one, a real one, hands that could bring a four-hundred-year-old reliquary back from the dead, a reputation that got her flown places, a flat with a north window and nobody's shoes in the hall but her own.

And then, in session forty-one, Dr. Priya Raman had said nothing for a full minute and then said: Eva. Who told you it was giving?

"So," said Eva, to the phone, at Gate 14.

She had to stop and do something with her mouth.

"So that's the thing. That's the whole thing. For eleven years I have thought of s*x as something you hand over. Like — like a deposit. Like you put yourself down as collateral and then you wait to find out what the interest rate is."

Boarding had started. Rows one through four. She didn't move.

"And I'd like to find out what it's like to take."

She said it flat, and then her eyes went hot, which was extremely annoying.

"That's it. That's the homework. I want to go somewhere hot and pick a man like a piece off a board and use him, kindly, thoroughly, and give him a nice time, and take exactly what I want, and get on a plane, and come home still owning every single thing I currently own."

She checked over her shoulder again. The toddler had moved on to the seat fabric.

"And I'm going to say the next bit fast, because you told me the euphemisms are part of the problem." She put her hand over her mouth and the phone both, and dropped her voice to almost nothing. "I want somebody's mouth on me. I want to find out what my own face does. I want to be so loud that somebody has to shut a window. I have thought about it every night for about four years and then got up in the morning and gone to work and been extremely normal, and I am tired, Dr. Raman. I'm twenty-four and I'm tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep."

A pause.

"Delete that part. You can't delete it. I know you can't delete it. Fine."

She wiped under her eye with the heel of her hand.

"And you're going to say: Eva, what if you like him. And I'm going to say: that's the one thing that cannot happen. So. Noted. Flagged. Moving on."

Rows five through nine.

"Ten days. I turn twenty-five on the island. My mother was married at twenty-five. I keep thinking about that. She had a whole husband at twenty-five and I have a very good set of scalpels."

She laughed, and it came out wrong, wet.

"Okay. Okay, that's — that's the memo. I'll do one when I land."

She reached for the stop button and then didn't press it, and sat with the phone in her hand and the airport noise going on around her, and said, much more quietly:

"I'm scared, actually. Just so it's in the file."

Then she stopped the recording, picked up her bag, and went to have the worst and best ten days of her entire life.