Ten days earlier. Monday, 8:05 a.m.
The heat of the water was a lie, but it was a lie Anna willingly let herself be seduced by.
Here, in the small, steam-filled world behind the shower wall of frosted glass, there were no window envelopes. No phone that could ring. No numbers. She let the jets drum against her shoulders and neck, felt them loosen knots she hadn’t known she had, and followed the familiar motions with the soap—down her arm, across her stomach, over the soft, heavy weight of her breast. She looked down at herself through the steam.
Her body was a weapon she had never learned to use. It wasn’t vanity; it was an observation she had made many times, matter-of-factly, the way you note that a piano stands untuned in a corner. Soft curves, firm lines, skin ivory-white except for the dark nipples that drew tight and hardened under her soapy hand, entirely on their own, as if they belonged to someone with fewer worries. A faint flush rose from her chest. Desire always lay smoldering somewhere in her, low and patient, like embers under ash. It was just that lust had become a luxury item. And she could not afford luxuries. Strictly speaking, she could not afford the soap.
One more minute. One more minute of escape, then she would get out and be an adult.
Reality came twenty seconds early.
A click. Small, almost inaudible, somewhere inside the walls—the sound of a relay letting go. Then the steady hum of the ceiling fan died. And then, in a fraction of a second, the water went from hot embrace to punishment.
Ice-cold.
She gasped, a sharp, involuntary drag of air, and stumbled backward against the tiles. The cold was merciless; it seized her around the ribcage and squeezed, and her body reacted ahead of thought: back to the wall, arms crossed over her chest, her nipples now two sharp, aching points for an entirely different reason than a moment before. She stood there heaving for breath while the cold water ran over her feet and down the drain.
The electricity.
They had actually done it.
She turned off the tap with a trembling hand. The silence that followed was total, and it was not a peaceful silence. It was a dead silence. The refrigerator, which always stood muttering to itself out in the kitchen, said nothing. The router wasn’t blinking. The sound of nothing. The sound of being cut off.
She took the thinnest, most threadbare towel—the two good ones were in the laundry basket, and the washing machine cost money—and went out into the apartment. The cold out there was the raw, damp kind, the kind that settles into the walls when the radiators have stood cold for weeks and August can no longer keep pretending to be summer in the mornings. She stood in the middle of the floor with the towel tight around her and dripping hair, and looked at the kitchen counter.
The evidence lay stacked where it had lain for two weeks. A pile of window envelopes, sorted in the order she could bear them: at the bottom the ones she had opened, in the middle the ones she knew the contents of, on top the one letter she hadn’t touched. She didn’t need to open it. The red print glowed through the plastic window like something infected: COLLECTION NOTICE. RISK OF DISCONNECTION.
It was no longer a risk. It was a fact. It was standing in the shower, freezing.
She sank onto the kitchen chair and began to count. It was an old habit, from when she was little and her father drove too fast on the county road: when it’s unbearable, count something. She counted the envelopes. Eleven. She counted the days until the rent came due again. Four. She counted the months she was behind. Three. She counted the number, the big one, the one that lay beneath all the other numbers like a dark cellar beneath a house, the number that had Thomas’s face and Thomas’s voice—it’s just bridge financing, Anna, three months, tops—and that had grown fatter on interest every single night for two years while he lay by a pool in Málaga and she learned which numbers the collection agencies called from.
She stopped counting before she reached the end. Reaching the end never helped.
The phone buzzed against the countertop. 54 percent battery, and no way to charge it. She looked at the screen and felt her stomach sink: Mom.
It was Monday. Her mother called on Wednesdays. Always Wednesdays, after dinner, when electricity was cheapest—Judith was of a generation that thought that way, that had never owned anything she hadn’t saved up for first. Anna let it buzz twice more, arranged her face into its Monday setting, and answered.
“Hi, Mom.”
