He put a hand at the small of her back, and for a while it felt like being held. That was the beginning - the dancing, the laughing, the private grammar of who yields and who holds, tender as only the most attentive love can be. They even had a word for it. A word that meant I've got you. You're safe.

She can't say when he stopped giving it back.

It happened the way everything between them happened - by increments too small to name, too small to fight. A trust handed over on a dance floor, quietly reclassified as a possession. A woman who became, somewhere in the long middle of them, simply the furniture of a man who believed he was always owed.

Now she dreams of a flickering room, a borrowed heart, and a string of pearls with no end.

She is not angry. Anger is hot, and a kind of attention - and she gave him the last of hers long ago. This is something cleaner.

This is only the bill.

A literary horror of love, power, and the terrible patience of the unspoken.