Ama was forty-three when she decided to stop correcting her body.
For six years the signals had been specific. Not vague discomfort, not generalized unease. She stopped sleeping before Monday morning. Her left hand went cold when she entered the conference room on the seventh floor. She was always tired after dinner at home but wide awake alone in the car, going anywhere. The signals were particular, almost diagnostic. Her body had not been speaking in metaphor.
She had argued with them. She had catalogued reasons. She had explained to herself, in careful detail, everything the signals could not mean.
The morning she stopped, she woke at four with the familiar Sunday-night failure to sleep and lay in the dark for a while. She counted nothing. She reviewed no argument. She listened instead to the particular quality of the silence in the room, which was a quality she had been hearing for years but had been calling other things.
She got up and made coffee. She stood at the counter and drank it. At five-thirty she called her sister, who was already awake, and said the thing she had been not saying for six years.
Her sister didn't ask what took so long. She said: I know. Ama said: I think my body has known since before I did. Her sister said: longer.
Ama stood at the counter with the phone and looked at her hand wrapped around the mug. It was warm all the way through.