Scene 30¶
Notes26-01-21e¶
Emily Original¶
Scene 30 — “The Brush” (Celeste POV) - 1st Run
✨ The Brush ✨
[26-01-21]
Wardrobe had learned, over the last three months, to run like a body instead of a panic.
Not because the work was easier—if anything it had become more precise, more demanding—but because the women inside it had stopped wasting effort on uncertainty. Tools had homes. Labels existed. The ledger sat where it belonged, open when it needed to be open, shut when it didn’t. Even Mara’s silences had started to feel less like weather and more like method.
And Charli—
Charli moved through the room as if she’d finally stopped waiting to be told she was in the way.
She arrived early, same as always, but the early-ness had changed. It used to feel like an apology. Now it felt like preference. She hung her bag on the hook without flinching. Washed her hands with the same thoroughness, but without the old tremor of performance. She laughed sometimes, quietly, and the laugh stayed in the air instead of disappearing the second it appeared.
She had become… easier to look at.
Not because she was “prettier.” Not because she was trying harder.
Because she was less afraid.
Mara set the next test on the table without ceremony: a cap and kerchief combination we’d been refining for the Faire women—something that had to survive heat, sweat, pins, movement, and the indignity of being yanked off and shoved into a tote bag between scenes.
“Hair,” Mara said, glancing at Charli as if the word was a tool she was calling for. “Fix it.”
Charli touched her own hair reflexively, as if the problem had just been named aloud. She’d pinned it back, but not with the discipline the cap required. Loose strands would catch. Pins would slip. The whole thing would migrate.
Tahlia, measuring a sleeve nearby, made a small amused noise. Lucy didn’t look up from her work. Sarah, perched like a judgmental crow on a stool, watched with the bright interest she reserved for social developments.
Charli stepped toward the mirror with a comb, uncertain.
I moved without thinking.
“Sit,” I said.
Charli looked at me as if I’d told her to walk into the ocean. Then she sat—careful, obedient, still holding her breath a little, like she wasn’t sure she’d earned the chair.
I reached for the brush.
It was an ordinary thing—wooden handle, bristles worn softer by use. Not a symbol. Not a gesture. A tool.
Still, when I drew it through her hair the first time, Charli went very still.
Not tense. Not flinching.
Just… attentive.
The brush made that low, dry sound it makes on clean hair. I worked from the ends up, practical. Untangle. Smooth. Part. No pulling. No fuss.
“Hold your head,” I said. “Don’t tip back.”
“Yes,” she murmured, and then, as if reflex demanded it, “Sorry.”
I stopped the brush for half a beat.
“Don’t apologise,” I said, flat. “Just hold still.”
She swallowed. “Yes.”
The room didn’t pause around us. That was the point. If I made this a Moment, it would become a spectacle. If I treated it like work, it would remain what it was: grooming for function. Preparation. Readiness.
I gathered her hair at the nape, measured the tension with my fingers, and began to twist it into a coil that would sit properly beneath the cap. Pins went in with the same economy we used for everything: enough to hold, not so many it became a hedgehog.
Sarah’s voice floated over from her stool.
“Look at that,” she said, pleased. “Civilisation.”
Charli’s mouth tried to smile and didn’t quite dare. Then it did.
It was small. It was real.
Lucy finally looked up long enough to say, “If she moves her head like that, the cap will sit properly. If she doesn’t, it’ll look like a mushroom.”
“Thank you,” Charli said automatically.
Lucy’s expression remained what it always was. “It’s not kindness. It’s geometry.”
I set the cap on Charli’s head and adjusted the angle. The kerchief followed, tied firmly enough to hold, not so tight it would dig. I checked the line at the forehead, the way the fabric framed her face.
For a second—only a second—I saw it: how right she looked in the thing. Not theatrically right. Not costume-right. But right in the way someone looks when the room around them finally matches something inside their body.
I did not comment on that.
I only said, “Turn your head left.”
She turned.
“Right.”
She turned.
“Good,” I said.
Mara glanced over, saw the fit, and gave a single curt nod—her version of approval.
“Now move,” Mara said. “Sweat. Bend. Prove it.”
Charli rose and began the wear-test: bending to reach fabric on the lower shelves, turning quickly, lifting her arms, moving through the narrow spaces between tables. The cap held. The kerchief held. The pins did their job.
Tahlia watched her, grin faint. Bree—one of the Faire girls—appeared in the doorway mid-test, took one look, and lit up.
“Oh, she looks proper,” Bree said, delighted.
No hesitation. No glance at anyone for permission.
Just she—as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world.
Charli’s cheeks went warm. She didn’t correct Bree. She didn’t even start to.
She just kept moving, and her mouth curved as if the word had landed gently instead of dangerously.
Sarah, of course, had to add her own brick to the wall.
“Don’t fuss her,” she called, loud enough for the whole room. “She’s not a delicate flower. She’s Celeste’s wife.”
It was said like a joke.
It was said like a truth.
The room laughed, and I saw Charli go pink—not the old mortified pink, the one that meant I’m in trouble—but a softer, bashful warmth. Proof that being seen was no longer a threat.
“Functionally,” Lucy added, as if delivering a verdict on a hem. “She does the wife work.”
Tahlia nodded, amused. “She does, though.”
Charli’s mouth opened, closed. For a moment, I thought she might protest out of habit.
Instead she said, softly, “I don’t mind.”
That phrase again—her safe little phrase, the one that made want sound like it wasn’t asking too much.
Bree clapped once, delighted. “Right then. She’s coming tonight.”
“She’s coming,” Tahlia echoed.
And the language moved through the room like water finding the lowest place.
“She needs the smaller pins.” “Tell her I’ve got the tape.” “She’s brutal on stress points.” “She’s our girl.”
I felt something settle in my chest—not surprise, not outrage.
Recognition.
This was not my decision to make, not anymore. It had moved beyond me, beyond private naming, beyond my own internal shorthand of wife as function. It had become social truth, spoken without apology by women who didn’t need to convene a committee to know what they knew.
Because women are not stupid about language. We understand what words do. We understand that the right word, used repeatedly in the right room, can make a person stop feeling like they’re trespassing.
I had not planned this.
But I had, unmistakably, contributed to the conditions that made it inevitable.
And now, looking at her—laughing, moving, held inside the chatter like she belonged there by law—I realised the room had done what it always did when something fit:
It had simply… adopted.
It would be cruelty to pull her back out of it.
So I didn’t.
I stepped closer and adjusted a lace end at her waist as if it was nothing. Not intimate. Not possessive. Just practical. A small correction to keep the line clean.
“Your shoulder line is better,” I said.
She looked up at me, checking—still, even now—whether she was in trouble.
She wasn’t.
“Thank you,” she said, and her voice didn’t shake.
The day moved on.
The cap survived sweat and motion. The kerchief didn’t slip. The ledger received its notes. Mara’s shears kept snicking. The room kept laughing.
And Charli kept laughing with it.
Not small.
Not stolen.
Real.
That evening, at home, the quiet hit me the way it always did after Wardrobe: like walking out of a river and realising your ears had been full of water.
Charli was in the shower. I could hear the muted rush behind the bathroom door, the steady sound of water striking tile.
I moved through the apartment, tidying without thinking. Habit. Reset the space. Put things back where they belonged.
Her bag was on the chair.
Not rummaged through. Not spilled open. Just… placed there, as if it had been arranged to look casual.
I don’t know what made me look.
It wasn’t suspicion. Not at first.
It was the same part of my brain that noticed seam strain and pin tension—the part that registered when something was slightly too controlled.
I lifted the bag and felt the weight shift in a way that didn’t match fabric.
I opened it.
Inside, tucked under folded cloth and a small notebook, was a pharmacy bottle.
White plastic. Printed label.
My stomach dropped before my mind caught up.
Spironolactone.
The name sat on the label like a fact that refused to be softened by context.
There were tablets missing.
Not a few. Enough to make the bottle look lived-in.
Enough to make the decision behind it feel old, not impulsive.
My first impulse was anger—hot and sharp and immediate.
Not at her.
At the risk.
At the secrecy.
At the thought of her taking anything unsupervised, unmonitored, unrecorded—her body becoming a private experiment without safeguards, without adult oversight, without anyone checking what it was doing to her.
And then the second impulse arrived, colder and steadier:
This was not a rebellion.
This was a solution.
A private solution.
A girl trying to keep her place in a room of women by any means available.
I closed the bag carefully, as if the bottle might explode.
Then I opened it again and took the bottle out.
There was no point pretending I hadn’t seen it. There was no point leaving it there like a trap.
The bottle was evidence, and it was danger.
I set it on the kitchen table and waited.
The shower stopped. A door opened. Footsteps. The soft sound of Charli’s towel rubbing her hair.
She came into the kitchen in a t-shirt and track pants, damp hair loose around her shoulders, face relaxed in a way I hadn’t seen months ago. She looked… good. Warmer. Lighter.
Then she saw the bottle.
All the light left her face.
She stopped so abruptly it was like she’d hit a wall.
Her eyes flicked to mine, then down to the label, then back up.
In that moment, she wasn’t Charli of the workroom—laughing, included, adopted.
She was the old version of herself: braced, terrified, trying to calculate what it would cost to be caught wanting.
“Where did you get it?” I asked.
My voice was quiet. Controlled.
Not gentle. Not cruel.
Adult.
Charli’s throat moved. “I—”
“Answer,” I said.
She swallowed. “Online.”
“How long?”
Her eyes dropped. “A while.”
“How long,” I repeated, and I heard, underneath my own calm, the steel that Wardrobe had taught me: standards, not sentiment.
She breathed in, shallow. “Weeks,” she whispered. “Maybe… two months.”
Two months.
Long enough for it to become routine. Long enough for her body to change under it. Long enough for her to build her happiness on it.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
Charli’s hands twisted in the edge of her towel. She didn’t look up.
“I didn’t want…” she began, and her voice cracked—not puberty, not physiology. Emotion. “I didn’t want it to go away.”
“What,” I said.
She shook her head, eyes bright. “The… the girls. The room. You. I didn’t want… I didn’t want to change back.”
There it was.
Not vanity.
Not fetish.
Fear.
Fear of being returned to the category that had always hurt.
I felt something in me tighten and then settle into place.
“This is not how we do it,” I said.
Charli flinched, as if she’d been slapped.
I kept my voice steady.
“This is not safe. This is not supervised. You don’t get to run your body like a private trial and hope it works out.”
Her lips trembled. “It was working.”
That one sentence—small, desperate—made my chest ache.
Because of course it had felt like it was working.
It had given her a sense of control. It had quieted whatever terror had been chewing at her. It had let her smile without fear.
And it had done it at a cost she didn’t know how to measure.
I reached out and put my hand over the bottle—not possessive, not dramatic. Simply covering it. Claiming responsibility.
“I’m taking this,” I said.
Charli’s eyes widened. “No—”
“Yes,” I said.
The word came out clean.
“You’re not punished,” I added, because I saw the panic rising. “But you are not continuing this without medical oversight. Do you understand me?”
Her breath hitched. She looked like she might bolt.
Then she didn’t.
She nodded, small.
“Yes,” she whispered.
I picked up my phone.
“Who are you calling?” she asked, voice tight.
“Lauren,” I said.
Her face went white.
“Mum—”
“Charli,” I said, and the name came out naturally, as if the room’s language had followed us home.
She froze.
I didn’t soften.
“We are not doing this alone. We are not keeping secrets that can harm you. Lauren needs to know, and we need professionals.”
Charli’s eyes shone. “Please don’t hate me.”
That—more than the bottle—was the thing I couldn’t allow in the room.
I stepped closer, not to comfort her with softness, but to anchor her with fact.
“I don’t hate you,” I said. “I’m angry you were unsafe. I’m angry you thought you had to do it alone. But I do not hate you.”
A tear slid down her cheek. She wiped it away quickly, as if tears were another kind of trouble.
I dialled.
When Lauren answered, I didn’t waste words.
“I found spironolactone,” I said. “Charli has been taking it unsupervised. For weeks.”
There was a pause on the line—silence with weight.
Then Lauren’s voice, tight. “Is she safe right now?”
“She’s here,” I said. “She’s safe. But this can’t continue.”
Another pause. I could hear Lauren breathing, holding herself together the way mothers do when the world tries to fracture them.
“I’m coming,” she said.
“Good,” I replied. “We need a plan. We need medical oversight. Bloodwork. A clinician who understands gender dysphoria. Whatever the pathway is, we do it properly.”
Lauren’s voice trembled once—just once—then steadied.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes. We do it properly.”
I ended the call and looked at Charli.
She was standing in the kitchen, towel clutched like armour, face raw, eyes frightened but fixed on me as if I was the only stable thing left in the room.
“We’re not going to discuss dosages,” I said. “We’re not going to discuss forums. We’re not going to do this like a hobby.”
Charli nodded.
I held her gaze.
“This will be boring,” I said. “Appointments. Questions. Paperwork. Waiting. But it will be safe.”
Her mouth trembled.
“Okay,” she whispered.
And in that whisper I heard everything she hadn’t said:
I’m tired of being afraid. I’m tired of pretending I don’t want this. I’m tired of losing whatever I touch.
I didn’t reassure her with romance.
I didn’t promise an easy road.
I simply did what Wardrobe did when something mattered:
I took it seriously.
“We start tomorrow,” I said.
Charli nodded again, and the nod was not agreement so much as surrender to structure—structure she’d been craving, structure she’d tried to replace with a bottle and secrecy.
In the quiet after, the apartment felt like Wardrobe did when the lights went down: still, intentional, waiting.
And for the first time, I understood with a clarity that made me almost cold:
Whatever Charli had done to keep her happiness safe inside her own body—whatever “solution” she’d found—had become part of who she thought she was.
Taking it away was not just confiscating pills.
It was touching the scaffolding of her identity.
That meant we would have to replace it with something real.
Something supervised.
Something that didn’t rely on fear.
And we would have to do it without breaking her.
If you'd like, I can proceed immediately to Scene 31 — “Maternal Conflict” (Lauren POV), picking up from Lauren arriving, the mother-daughter collision, Lauren’s contained grief/anger/guilt, and the decision to seek proper medical/psychiatric support — still without dwelling on clinical mechanics.
Notes26-01-21eahp¶
Emily Original¶
Scene — “After Hours Pizza” (Sarah POV) - First Run
✨ After Hours Pizza ✨
[26-01-21]
Wardrobe after hours wasn’t a workplace.
It was a women’s room.
By day the place ran like a machine—steam, chalk, shears, the ledger sitting there like a second spine. By night it changed texture. The noise softened. The air cooled. The worktables stopped looking like battlefields and started looking like furniture.
Someone had turned off the harsh lights and left the warm ones. The ones that made you look human instead of inspected.
Tahlia had dragged two trestle tables together and covered them with brown paper like we were about to do craft with toddlers. Lucy had found a stack of mismatched plates and lined them up with the same grim efficiency she used for grommets. Bree and two of the Faire girls—women with glitter still trapped in the corners of their eyes from rehearsal—were perched on stools like this was backstage and home at the same time.
And then there was the smell.
Pizza.
Warm cardboard, melted cheese, oregano that tried very hard to be Italian in a room full of Australians.
I held the box like a trophy when I came in.
“Right,” I announced. “I’ve done the noble thing and fed the proletariat.”
Lucy didn’t look up. “You’ve brought grease into a textile environment.”
“Correct,” I said. “It’s called morale.”
Tahlia grinned. “Did you get the garlic bread?”
“Of course I got the garlic bread,” I said. “I’m not a monster.”
Someone whooped. Someone clapped. The energy in the room shifted immediately, like you’d cracked a window and let something warmer in.
Charli came in behind me, quieter than the rest of us, carrying a stack of napkins as if she’d personally negotiated them into existence. She’d washed her hands already—of course she had—and her hair was pinned back in that tidy, practical way Wardrobe had taught her.
She paused at the edge of the gathering, like she still hadn’t quite accepted that she was allowed to be here when the work was technically over.
Not because anyone had ever told her to leave.
Because old instincts die hard.
Tahlia saw her and made a little beckoning motion with the back of her fingers—no fuss, no ceremony. The kind of gesture that says come on, don’t be weird in the nicest possible way.
“Charli,” she said, as if Charli had always been part of after-hours.
Charli’s shoulders dropped a fraction. She stepped closer.
Lucy slid a plate into the gap in front of her without looking up.
Not kindness, strictly speaking. Lucy didn’t do “kindness” as a hobby.
But the plate appearing was, in Lucy-language, a form of inclusion so blunt it was almost tender.
Bree leaned across the table, bright-eyed. “You’re staying, yeah? We’re debriefing.”
Charli blinked. “Debriefing?”
“Rehearsal trauma,” Bree said. “Costume trauma. Emotional trauma. Pizza trauma.”
Charli’s mouth twitched. “I can… stay.”
She said it like she was asking permission.
Nobody answered like it was a question.
I set the boxes down and flicked them open. Heat rolled out. Cheese strings. That first glorious whiff of food that isn’t trying to be healthy.
“Right,” I said. “Grab. Before Lucy writes a policy document.”
Lucy looked up at last. “I already have.”
“Of course you do,” I said, delighted. “Does it include a section on pineapple?”
“It includes a section on banning you,” Lucy replied.
Tahlia laughed. Bree made a dramatic noise of despair. The other girls started talking at once—about rehearsal, about a director who’d lost her mind, about a hem that had betrayed them in front of an audience like a public divorce.
Charli hovered for maybe three seconds and then, very carefully, reached for a slice.
It was an ordinary motion.
But in this room, ordinariness was a kind of miracle.
We ate standing up at first, then sitting, then perching, then sprawling. Someone put music on low. Someone found a bottle of soft drink. Someone else found beer and immediately got told off by Tahlia for even thinking about opening it near the fabric.
“Take it outside,” she said, stern.
The girl shrugged and obeyed. Like it was normal to be told no by another woman and not treat it like an assault on freedom.
Charli sat at the end of the table with a slice held in both hands, careful not to drip. She listened more than she spoke, eyes moving between faces as if she was still learning the rules of this particular species of female chaos.
I watched her without making it obvious. I’m good at that. British survival skill.
She used to look like she was waiting for someone to yank her collar and say, Oi, wrong room.
Tonight she looked… comfortable. Not fully. Not the way the rest of us did, throwing our legs over stools and talking with our mouths full like civilised animals.
But comfortable enough that she didn’t have that old tightness at the edges.
Bree reached across and stole a chip off Charli’s plate—bold as anything.
Charli startled and then laughed, surprised by her own laugh.
Bree pointed at her. “There. That. That’s the sound we like.”
Charli went pink.
I leaned in. “Careful, Bree. Compliments make her nervous.”
Charli shot me a look. “I’m not—”
“You are,” Lucy said immediately, deadpan, and went back to chewing.
The Faire girls cackled. Tahlia grinned. Charli opened her mouth, closed it, and then—very softly—smiled.
It was the kind of smile that didn’t try to run away.
Someone—one of the actresses, a woman named Dani with forearms like she could wrestle a costume rack—said, “She’s a good egg.”
Just like that.
She.
No pause. No performance. No careful glance to see if anyone objected.
Charli froze for half a second, eyes flicking down, then up again.
And she didn’t correct it.
She didn’t do the old stiff little laugh and try to make it safe for everyone else.
She just… accepted the word like it was a warm thing being placed gently in her hands.
I watched that happen and felt my throat tighten in a way that surprised me.
Not because of politics. Not because of ideology.
Because of belonging.
Because you could see it land in her.
Lucy—who had the emotional range of a stapler—looked up and said, “She’s also ruthless on stress points. Which is what we need.”
“That’s our girl,” Bree said, mouth full.
Tahlia nodded, casual as breathing. “Yeah. She is.”
Charli’s eyes widened a fraction, like she’d been addressed directly by the universe.
She swallowed.
Then she said, almost inaudibly, “I don’t mind.”
There it was again.
Her little phrase.
The one she used when she didn’t want to seem greedy for a thing that mattered.
Bree leaned closer, suddenly very serious for a woman who had just shoved pizza into her face. “Good,” she said. “Because we’ve decided you’re ours.”
Charli blinked fast.
“Bree,” I warned, because Bree had the subtlety of a brass band.
“What?” Bree said. “It’s true.”
“It is,” Dani agreed, shrugging. “She’s safe. She’s funny. She works hard. She doesn’t make it weird. That’s… basically the list.”
Lucy nodded once, as if she was stamping a form. “Approved.”
Charli’s laugh came out again, half disbelieving. She pressed her lips together as if trying not to show too much of it.
Tahlia reached over and tapped Charli’s wrist with the back of her fingers. Gentle. Ordinary. Sisterly.
“Eat,” she said. “Stop looking like you’re about to be expelled.”
Charli’s shoulders dropped. She took another bite.
And there it was: the smallest shift in her posture, the loosening of a brace she’d worn so long she’d forgotten it was optional.
The conversation rolled on. Rehearsal horror stories. Costume disasters. Someone’s ex. Someone’s mum. Someone’s plan to move to Melbourne and become a barista as if that was a personality.
At some point, Charli started speaking without checking first.
Not big speeches. Not declarations.
Just little contributions—dry observations, careful jokes, a quiet “actually” when someone got a garment detail wrong. And the room met her with the same thing it met everyone with: laughter, correction, warmth.
No tiptoeing.
No special handling.
Just… inclusion.
I caught myself looking at her hands. The way she held the slice. Neat. Considerate. As if she couldn’t quite believe she was allowed to be messy in front of women.
Bree nudged her. “You coming to the dress run tomorrow?”
Charli hesitated. That old reflex, checking for permission.
Then Lucy said, “Yes, she is.”
And just like that, the hesitation didn’t have anything to hold onto.
Charli nodded. “Yes. I can.”
Tahlia’s grin was bright. “Good. Because you’re going to spot every weak seam and save our lives.”
Bree raised her slice like a toast. “To Charli, destroyer of bad stitching.”
“Oi,” I said. “You’re going to give her ideas.”
Charli laughed—properly this time—and the sound made something in the room go quieter for a beat, like everyone had noticed it was real.
Then we all started talking again, because women do not pause for sentiment unless they’ve chosen it.
We just kept eating. Kept laughing. Kept existing together like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.
And Charli sat among us—pink-cheeked, careful, glowing in that shy way—and looked, for once, like she wasn’t waiting for the door to close.
She looked like she’d found the room she’d been trying to reach her whole life.
And because we aren’t stupid about these things, because we know what language does and what it costs to be kept outside, nobody took it back.
Not even for a second.
Notes26-01-22e O¶
Emily Original¶
✨ The Brush ✨
[26-01-22]
Scene 30 — “The Brush” (Celeste POV)
Wardrobe had learned, over the last three months, to run like a body instead of a panic.
Not because the work was easier—if anything it had become more precise, more demanding—but because the women inside it had stopped wasting effort on uncertainty. Tools had homes. Labels existed. The ledger sat where it belonged, open when it needed to be open, shut when it didn’t. Even Mara’s silences had started to feel less like weather and more like method.
And Charli—
Charli moved through the room as if she’d finally stopped waiting to be told she was in the way.
She arrived early, same as always, but the early-ness had changed. It used to feel like an apology. Now it felt like preference. She hung her bag on the hook without flinching. Washed her hands with the same thoroughness, but without the old tremor of performance. She laughed sometimes, quietly, and the laugh stayed in the air instead of disappearing the second it appeared.
She had become… easier to look at.
Not because she was “prettier.” Not because she was trying harder.
Because she was less afraid.
Mara set the next test on the table without ceremony: a cap and kerchief combination we’d been refining for the Faire women—something that had to survive heat, sweat, pins, movement, and the indignity of being yanked off and shoved into a tote bag between scenes.
“Hair,” Mara said, glancing at Charli as if the word was a tool she was calling for. “Fix it.”
Charli touched her own hair reflexively, as if the problem had just been named aloud. She’d pinned it back, but not with the discipline the cap required. Loose strands would catch. Pins would slip. The whole thing would migrate.
Tahlia, measuring a sleeve nearby, made a small amused noise. Lucy didn’t look up from her work. Sarah, perched like a judgmental crow on a stool, watched with the bright interest she reserved for social developments.
Charli stepped toward the mirror with a comb, uncertain.
I moved without thinking.
“Sit,” I said.
Charli looked at me as if I’d told her to walk into the ocean. Then she sat—careful, obedient, still holding her breath a little, like she wasn’t sure she’d earned the chair.
I reached for the brush.
It was an ordinary thing—wooden handle, bristles worn softer by use. Not a symbol. Not a gesture. A tool.
Still, when I drew it through her hair the first time, Charli went very still.
Not tense. Not flinching.
Just… attentive.
The brush made that low, dry sound it makes on clean hair. I worked from the ends up, practical. Untangle. Smooth. Part. No pulling. No fuss.
“Hold your head,” I said. “Don’t tip back.”
“Yes,” she murmured, and then, as if reflex demanded it, “Sorry.”
I stopped the brush for half a beat.
“Don’t apologise,” I said, flat. “Just hold still.”
She swallowed. “Yes.”
The room didn’t pause around us. That was the point. If I made this a Moment, it would become a spectacle. If I treated it like work, it would remain what it was: grooming for function. Preparation. Readiness.
I gathered her hair at the nape, measured the tension with my fingers, and began to twist it into a coil that would sit properly beneath the cap. Pins went in with the same economy we used for everything: enough to hold, not so many it became a hedgehog.
Sarah’s voice floated over from her stool.
“Look at that,” she said, pleased. “Civilisation.”
Charli’s mouth tried to smile and didn’t quite dare. Then it did.
It was small. It was real.
Lucy finally looked up long enough to say, “If she moves her head like that, the cap will sit properly. If she doesn’t, it’ll look like a mushroom.”
“Thank you,” Charli said automatically.
Lucy’s expression remained what it always was. “It’s not kindness. It’s geometry.”
I set the cap on Charli’s head and adjusted the angle. The kerchief followed, tied firmly enough to hold, not so tight it would dig. I checked the line at the forehead, the way the fabric framed her face.
For a second—only a second—I saw it: how right she looked in the thing. Not theatrically right. Not costume-right. But right in the way someone looks when the room around them finally matches something inside their body.
I did not comment on that.
I only said, “Turn your head left.”
She turned.
“Right.”
She turned.
“Good,” I said.
Mara glanced over, saw the fit, and gave a single curt nod—her version of approval.
“Now move,” Mara said. “Sweat. Bend. Prove it.”
Charli rose and began the wear-test: bending to reach fabric on the lower shelves, turning quickly, lifting her arms, moving through the narrow spaces between tables. The cap held. The kerchief held. The pins did their job.
Tahlia watched her, grin faint. Bree—one of the Faire girls—appeared in the doorway mid-test, took one look, and lit up.
“Oh, she looks proper,” Bree said, delighted.
No hesitation. No glance at anyone for permission.
Just she—as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world.
Charli’s cheeks went warm. She didn’t correct Bree. She didn’t even start to.
She just kept moving, and her mouth curved as if the word had landed gently instead of dangerously.
Sarah, of course, had to add her own brick to the wall.
“Don’t fuss her,” she called, loud enough for the whole room. “She’s not a delicate flower. She’s Celeste’s wife.”
It was said like a joke.
It was said like a truth.
The room laughed, and I saw Charli go pink—not the old mortified pink, the one that meant I’m in trouble—but a softer, bashful warmth. Proof that being seen was no longer a threat.
“Functionally,” Lucy added, as if delivering a verdict on a hem. “She does the wife work.”
Tahlia nodded, amused. “She does, though.”
Charli’s mouth opened, closed. For a moment, I thought she might protest out of habit.
Instead she said, softly, “I don’t mind.”
That phrase again—her safe little phrase, the one that made want sound like it wasn’t asking too much.
Bree clapped once, delighted. “Right then. She’s coming tonight.”
“She’s coming,” Tahlia echoed.
And the language moved through the room like water finding the lowest place.
“She needs the smaller pins.” “Tell her I’ve got the tape.” “She’s brutal on stress points.” “She’s our girl.”
I felt something settle in my chest—not surprise, not outrage.
Recognition.
This was not my decision to make, not anymore. It had moved beyond me, beyond private naming, beyond my own internal shorthand of wife as function. It had become social truth, spoken without apology by women who didn’t need to convene a committee to know what they knew.
Because women are not stupid about language. We understand what words do. We understand that the right word, used repeatedly in the right room, can make a person stop feeling like they’re trespassing.
I had not planned this.
But I had, unmistakably, contributed to the conditions that made it inevitable.
And now, looking at her—laughing, moving, held inside the chatter like she belonged there by law—I realised the room had done what it always did when something fit:
It had simply… adopted.
It would be cruelty to pull her back out of it.
So I didn’t.
I stepped closer and adjusted a lace end at her waist as if it was nothing. Not intimate. Not possessive. Just practical. A small correction to keep the line clean.
“Your shoulder line is better,” I said.
She looked up at me, checking—still, even now—whether she was in trouble.
She wasn’t.
“Thank you,” she said, and her voice didn’t shake.
The day moved on.
The cap survived sweat and motion. The kerchief didn’t slip. The ledger received its notes. Mara’s shears kept snicking. The room kept laughing.
And Charli kept laughing with it.
Not small.
Not stolen.
Real.
That evening, at home, the quiet hit me the way it always did after Wardrobe: like walking out of a river and realising your ears had been full of water.
Charli was in the shower. I could hear the muted rush behind the bathroom door, the steady sound of water striking tile.
I moved through the apartment, tidying without thinking. Habit. Reset the space. Put things back where they belonged.
Her bag was on the chair.
Not rummaged through. Not spilled open. Just… placed there, as if it had been arranged to look casual.
I don’t know what made me look.
It wasn’t suspicion. Not at first.
It was the same part of my brain that noticed seam strain and pin tension—the part that registered when something was slightly too controlled.
I lifted the bag and felt the weight shift in a way that didn’t match fabric.
I opened it.
Inside, tucked under folded cloth and a small notebook, was a pharmacy bottle.
White plastic. Printed label.
My stomach dropped before my mind caught up.
Spironolactone.
The name sat on the label like a fact that refused to be softened by context.
There were tablets missing.
Not a few. Enough to make the bottle look lived-in.
Enough to make the decision behind it feel old, not impulsive.
My first impulse was anger—hot and sharp and immediate.
Not at her.
At the risk.
At the secrecy.
At the thought of her taking anything unsupervised, unmonitored, unrecorded—her body becoming a private experiment without safeguards, without adult oversight, without anyone checking what it was doing to her.
And then the second impulse arrived, colder and steadier:
This was not a rebellion.
This was a solution.
A private solution.
A girl trying to keep her place in a room of women by any means available.
I closed the bag carefully, as if the bottle might explode.
Then I opened it again and took the bottle out.
There was no point pretending I hadn’t seen it. There was no point leaving it there like a trap.
The bottle was evidence, and it was danger.
I set it on the kitchen table and waited.
The shower stopped. A door opened. Footsteps. The soft sound of Charli’s towel rubbing her hair.
She came into the kitchen in a t-shirt and track pants, damp hair loose around her shoulders, face relaxed in a way I hadn’t seen months ago. She looked… good. Warmer. Lighter.
Then she saw the bottle.
All the light left her face.
She stopped so abruptly it was like she’d hit a wall.
Her eyes flicked to mine, then down to the label, then back up.
In that moment, she wasn’t Charli of the workroom—laughing, included, adopted.
She was the old version of herself: braced, terrified, trying to calculate what it would cost to be caught wanting.
“Where did you get it?” I asked.
My voice was quiet. Controlled.
Not gentle. Not cruel.
Adult.
Charli’s throat moved. “I—”
“Answer,” I said.
She swallowed. “Online.”
“How long?”
Her eyes dropped. “A while.”
“How long,” I repeated, and I heard, underneath my own calm, the steel that Wardrobe had taught me: standards, not sentiment.
She breathed in, shallow. “Weeks,” she whispered. “Maybe… two months.”
Two months.
Long enough for it to become routine. Long enough for her body to change under it. Long enough for her to build her happiness on it.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
Charli’s hands twisted in the edge of her towel. She didn’t look up.
“I didn’t want…” she began, and her voice cracked—not puberty, not physiology. Emotion. “I didn’t want it to go away.”
“What,” I said.
She shook her head, eyes bright. “The… the girls. The room. You. I didn’t want… I didn’t want to change back.”
There it was.
Not vanity.
Not fetish.
Fear.
Fear of being returned to the category that had always hurt.
I felt something in me tighten and then settle into place.
“This is not how we do it,” I said.
Charli flinched, as if she’d been slapped.
I kept my voice steady.
“This is not safe. This is not supervised. You don’t get to run your body like a private trial and hope it works out.”
Her lips trembled. “It was working.”
That one sentence—small, desperate—made my chest ache.
Because of course it had felt like it was working.
It had given her a sense of control. It had quieted whatever terror had been chewing at her. It had let her smile without fear.
And it had done it at a cost she didn’t know how to measure.
I reached out and put my hand over the bottle—not possessive, not dramatic. Simply covering it. Claiming responsibility.
“I’m taking this,” I said.
Charli’s eyes widened. “No—”
“Yes,” I said.
The word came out clean.
“You’re not punished,” I added, because I saw the panic rising. “But you are not continuing this without medical oversight. Do you understand me?”
Her breath hitched. She looked like she might bolt.
Then she didn’t.
She nodded, small.
“Yes,” she whispered.
I picked up my phone.
“Who are you calling?” she asked, voice tight.
“Lauren,” I said.
Her face went white.
“Mum—”
“Charli,” I said, and the name came out naturally, as if the room’s language had followed us home.
She froze.
I didn’t soften.
“We are not doing this alone. We are not keeping secrets that can harm you. Lauren needs to know, and we need professionals.”
Charli’s eyes shone. “Please don’t hate me.”
That—more than the bottle—was the thing I couldn’t allow in the room.
I stepped closer, not to comfort her with softness, but to anchor her with fact.
“I don’t hate you,” I said. “I’m angry you were unsafe. I’m angry you thought you had to do it alone. But I do not hate you.”
A tear slid down her cheek. She wiped it away quickly, as if tears were another kind of trouble.
I dialled.
When Lauren answered, I didn’t waste words.
“I found spironolactone,” I said. “Charli has been taking it unsupervised. For weeks.”
There was a pause on the line—silence with weight.
Then Lauren’s voice, tight. “Is she safe right now?”
“She’s here,” I said. “She’s safe. But this can’t continue.”
Another pause. I could hear Lauren breathing, holding herself together the way mothers do when the world tries to fracture them.
“I’m coming,” she said.
“Good,” I replied. “We need a plan. We need medical oversight. Bloodwork. A clinician who understands gender dysphoria. Whatever the pathway is, we do it properly.”
Lauren’s voice trembled once—just once—then steadied.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes. We do it properly.”
I ended the call and looked at Charli.
She was standing in the kitchen, towel clutched like armour, face raw, eyes frightened but fixed on me as if I was the only stable thing left in the room.
“We’re not going to discuss dosages,” I said. “We’re not going to discuss forums. We’re not going to do this like a hobby.”
Charli nodded.
I held her gaze.
“This will be boring,” I said. “Appointments. Questions. Paperwork. Waiting. But it will be safe.”
Her mouth trembled.
“Okay,” she whispered.
And in that whisper I heard everything she hadn’t said:
I’m tired of being afraid. I’m tired of pretending I don’t want this. I’m tired of losing whatever I touch.
I didn’t reassure her with romance.
I didn’t promise an easy road.
I simply did what Wardrobe did when something mattered:
I took it seriously.
“We start tomorrow,” I said.
Charli nodded again, and the nod was not agreement so much as surrender to structure—structure she’d been craving, structure she’d tried to replace with a bottle and secrecy.
In the quiet after, the apartment felt like Wardrobe did when the lights went down: still, intentional, waiting.
And for the first time, I understood with a clarity that made me almost cold:
Whatever Charli had done to keep her happiness safe inside her own body—whatever “solution” she’d found—had become part of who she thought she was.
Taking it away was not just confiscating pills.
It was touching the scaffolding of her identity.
That meant we would have to replace it with something real.
Something supervised.
Something that didn’t rely on fear.
And we would have to do it without breaking her.
If you'd like, I can proceed immediately to Scene 31 — “Maternal Conflict” (Lauren POV), picking up from Lauren arriving, the mother-daughter collision, Lauren’s contained grief/anger/guilt, and the decision to seek proper medical/psychiatric support — still without dwelling on clinical mechanics.
Notes26-01-22r¶
Robyn's Take¶
✨ -- ✨ Wardrobe had learned, over the last three months, to run like a body instead of a panic, not because the work was easier—if anything it had become more precise, more demanding—but because the women inside it had stopped wasting effort on uncertainty. Tools had homes. Labels existed. The ledger sat where it belonged, open when it needed to be open, shut when it didn’t. Even Mara’s silences had started to feel less like weather and more like method.
And Charli?
Charli moved through the room as if she’d finally stopped waiting to be told she was in the way.
She arrived early, same as always, but the early-ness had changed. It used to feel like an apology: now, it felt like preference. She hung her bag on the hook without flinching. Washed her hands with the same thoroughness, but without the old tremor of performance. She laughed sometimes, quietly, and the laugh stayed in the air instead of disappearing the second it appeared.
She had become... easier to look at. Not because she was “prettier” or because she was trying harder.
Because she was less afraid.
Mara set the next test on the table without ceremony: a cap and kerchief combination we’d been refining for the Faire women: something that had to survive heat, sweat, pins, movement, and the indignity of being yanked off and shoved into a tote bag between scenes.
“Hair,” Mara said, glancing at Charli as if the word was a tool she was calling for. “Fix it.”
Charli touched her own hair reflexively, as if the problem had just been named aloud. She had tied it back, in her customary scruffy ponytail. Tt was not with the discipline the cap required. Loose strands would catch. Pins would slip. The whole thing would migrate.
Tahlia, measuring a sleeve nearby, made a small amused noise. Lucy didn’t look up from her work. Sarah, perched like a judgmental crow on a stool, watched with the bright interest she reserved for social developments.
Charli stepped toward the mirror with a comb, uncertain.
I moved without thinking.
“Sit.”
Charli looked at me as if I’d told her to walk into the ocean. Then she sat, carefully, obediently, still holding her breath a little, like she wasn’t sure she’d earned the chair.
I reached for the brush. It was an ordinary thing, with a wooden handle and bristles clogged with hair. When I drew it through her hair the first time, Charli went very still.
Not tense or flinching. Attentive. The brush made that low, dry sound a brush makes on clean long hair. I worked from the ends up, practical. Untangle. Smooth. Part. No pulling. No fuss.
“Hold your head,” I said. “Don’t tip back.”
“Yes,” she murmured, and then, an old reflex: “Sorry.”
I stopped the brush for half a beat and shook my head.
“Don’t apologise,” I said, flat. “Just hold still.”
“Okay.”
The room didn’t pause around us.
I gathered her hair at the nape, measured the tension with my fingers, and began to twist it into a coil that would sit properly beneath the cap. Pins went in with the same economy we used for everything: enough to hold, not so many it became a hedgehog. Sarah’s voice floated over from her stool.
“Look at that,” she said, pleased. “Civilisation.”
Charli’s smiled: a real smile.
Lucy looked up from her work long enough to say, “If she moves her head like that, the cap will sit properly. If she doesn’t, it’ll look like a mushroom.”
“Thank you,” Charli said automatically.
Lucy’s expression remained what it always was. “It’s just geometry.”
I set the cap on Charli’s head and adjusted the angle. The kerchief followed, tied firmly enough to hold, not so tight it would dig. I checked the line at the forehead, the way the fabric framed her face. For a second, only a second, I saw it: how right she looked in the thing, right in the way someone looks when the room around them finally matches something inside their body.
“Turn your head left.”
She turned.
“Right.”
She turned.
“Good.”
Mara glanced over, saw the fit, and gave a single curt nod, her version of approval.
“Now move,” Mara said. “Sweat. Bend. Prove it.”
Charli rose and began the wear-test: bending to reach fabric on the lower shelves, turning quickly, lifting her arms, moving through the narrow spaces between tables. The cap held. The kerchief held. The pins did their job. Tahlia watched her with a faint grin. Bree appeared in the doorway mid-test, took one look, and beamed.
“Oh, she looks proper Missy!”
The room laughed, and I saw Charli go pink: a soft, bashful warmth.
Bree clapped once, delighted. “Right then. She’s coming tonight.”
“She’s coming,” Tahlia echoed.
The day moved on.
The cap survived sweat and motion. The kerchief didn’t slip. The ledger received its notes. Mara’s shears kept snicking. The room kept laughing. And Charli kept laughing with it. Not small.
Real.
That evening, at home, the quiet hit me the way it always did after Wardrobe: like walking out of a river and realising your ears had been full of water.
Charli was in the shower. I could hear the muted rush behind the bathroom door, the steady sound of water striking tile. I moved through the apartment, tidying without thinking. Habit. Reset the space. Put things back where they belonged.
Her bag was on the chair. Not rummaged through. Not spilled open. Just... placed there, as if it had been arranged to look casual.
I don’t know what made me look. It wasn’t suspicion, not at first. It was the same part of my brain that noticed seam strain and pin tension, the part that registered when something was slightly too controlled. I lifted the bag and felt the weight shift in a way that didn’t match fabric.
I opened it.
Inside, tucked under folded cloth and a small notebook, was a pharmacy bottle. White plastic. Printed label. My stomach dropped before my mind caught up.
Spironolactone.
The name sat on the label like a fact that refused to be softened by context. I had heard of it. Anti-androgen. Puberty-blocker. A medication for which you need a script.
It was almost empty, empty enough to make the decision behind it feel old, not impulsive.
She had told me nothing about this.
My first impulse was anger: hot and sharp and immediate.
Not at her. At the risk.
At the secrecy.
It was anger at the thought of her taking anything unsupervised, unmonitored, unrecorded: her body becoming a private experiment without safeguards, without adult oversight, without anyone checking what it was doing to her.
And then the realisation arrived, colder and steadier: this was not rebellion.
This was a solution.
A private solution. Her solution. A girl trying to keep her place in a room of women by any means available.
I closed the bag carefully, as if the bottle might explode.
Then I opened it again and took the bottle out. There was no point pretending I hadn’t seen it. There was no point leaving it there like a trap. The bottle was evidence: it represented danger.
I set it on the kitchen table and waited.
The shower stopped. A door opened. Footsteps. The soft sound of Charli’s towel rubbing her hair.
She came into the kitchen in a t-shirt and track pants, damp hair loose around her shoulders, face relaxed in a way I hadn’t seen months ago. She looked... good. Warmer. Lighter.
Then she saw the bottle.
All the light left her face. She stopped so abruptly it was like she’d hit a wall. Her eyes flicked to mine, then down to the bottle, then back up to my face. In that moment, she wasn’t Charli of the workroom: laughing, included, adopted. She was the old version of herself: braced, terrified, trying to calculate what it would cost to be caught wanting.
“Where did you get it?”
My voice was quiet. Controlled. Adult.
Charli’s throat moved. “I—”
“Answer me.”
She swallowed. “Online.”
“How long?”
Her eyes dropped. “A while.”
“How long?” I repeated, and I heard, underneath my own calm, the steel that Wardrobe had taught me: standards, not sentiment. She breathed in, shallow.
“A while,” she whispered and then, glancing at my face, added quickly. “Okay... almost four months.”
Four months. Long enough for it to become her routine. Long enough for it to affect her body. And, long enough for her to build her happiness on it. I sighed.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Charli’s hands twisted in the edge of her towel. She didn’t look up.
“I didn’t want...” she began, and her voice cracked. “I didn’t want it to go away.”
“Didn't want what to go away?” My voice had an edge: I could tell by her shivering. She shook her head, eyes bright.
“The... the girls. The room. You. I didn’t want...” She took in a shuddering breath. Then, the words came spilling out. "I was changing. It was horrible. The changes I didn't think would happen, were... happening. It made me sick. I was scared I was going to turn..." She didn't finish. She didn't have to. There it was.
Not vanity.
Fear.
Fear of being returned to the category that had always hurt, because biology was betraying her. I felt something in me tighten and then settle into place.
“This is not how we do it.” I look her, steady. Charli flinched, didn't look up. “This is not safe. This is not supervised. You don’t get to do things to your body like a private trial and hope it works out.”
Her lips trembled. “But it was working.”
Her voice—small, desperate—made my chest ache. Because, of course it was working. And what else was happening didn't seem to enter into her equation. Stopping—even reversing—the effects of biology had given her a sense of control. It had quieted whatever terror had been chewing at her. It had let her smile without fear.
But it had done it at a cost she didn’t understand or know how to measure.
I reached out and put my hand over the bottle, not possessive or dramatic: simply covered it. Claiming responsibility.
“I’m taking this.”
Charli’s eyes widened. “No—” she whispered, panic and imploring chasing each other accross her face.
“Yes.”
The word came out clean. Final.
“Look, you’re not being punished, Charli,” I said as gently as I could, keeping my own fear from spilling into her panic. “But you cannot do this without medical oversight. Do you understand me?”
Her breath hitched. A long moment passed. Finally, she nodded, small.
“Yes,” she whispered.
I picked up my phone.
“Who are you calling?” she asked, her voice tight.
“Your mum.”
Her face went white.
“Mum—”
“Charli, listen! We are not doing this alone." The firmness in my voice surprised me. "We are not keeping secrets that can harm you. Your mum needs to know. We need to get you professional help.”
Charli seemed to shrink into herself. She sat silent for several minutes while I retrieved my phone. When I returned to the kitchen, she was looking like the old Charlie, the disappearing Charlie. It was still her, but the glow of happiness was gone. My heart ached at how her eyes shone with unspilled tears.
“Please don’t hate me.”
That was worse than finding the bottle: this expression of fear of rejection. I stepped closer. I ached to comfort her with softness, wrap her in cotton wool. And, as a result, make her dependent on me. I realised the best course was to anchor her with fact.
“Charli, I don’t hate you,” I said. “I am angry you did something that was so unsafe. And I’m angry you thought you had to do it alone. But I do not hate you.”
A tear slid down her cheek: she wiped it away quickly.
I dialled.
When Lauren answered, I didn’t waste words.
“I found an anti-androgen in Charli's purse, Lauren,” I said. “Spironolactone. Charli got it online: she's been taking it for months.”
There was a pause on the line—silence with weight. Then finally, her voice, tight.
“Is she okay right now?”
“She’s here,” I said. “She’s safe. But... this can’t continue.”
Another pause. I could hear Lauren breathing, holding herself together the way mothers do when the world tries to fracture them.
“I’m coming over.”
“Please do,” I replied. “We need a plan. We need medical oversight, like, with bloodwork and everything. She needs to see specialists who... understand this. Whatever the pathway is going forward, we need to do it properly.”
Lauren’s voice trembled once, just once, then steadied.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “Yes. We do it properly.”
I ended the call and looked at Charli. She was standing in the kitchen, towel clutched like armour, face raw, eyes frightened, fixed on me.
“We are going to get you help with this,” I said with determination. “Not on online forums: this is a serious step.”
Charli nodded, the hopelessnes slowly fading from her shoulders. Her red eyes sought mine. I held her gaze.
“This will be a series of boring appointments. Questions. Paperwork. Waiting. But it will be safe.”
Her mouth trembled.
“Okay.”
The word came out in a whisper. And in that whisper I heard everything she hadn’t said:
I’m tired of being afraid. I’m tired of pretending I don’t want this. I’m tired of losing whatever I touch.
“We start tomorrow.”
Charli nodded again. Her nod signalled the return to the new Charli, the one that understood surrender to structure—structure she’d been craving, structure she’d tried to replace with a bottle and secrecy. In the ensuing quiet, the apartment felt like Wardrobe did when the lights went down: still, intentional, waiting.
And for the first time, I understood with a clarity that made me almost cold: whatever Charli had done to keep her happiness safe inside her own body—whatever “solution” she’d found—had become part of who she thought she was.
Taking it away was not just confiscating pills: it was touching the scaffolding of her identity. Which meant we would have to replace it with something real. Something supervised. Something that didn’t rely on fear.
And we would have to do it without breaking her.
Bottle Vignette¶
She came into the kitchen in a t-shirt and track pants, hair damp and loose around her shoulders — relaxed in a way that still startled me.
Then she saw the bottle.
The light left her face. Not gradually. All at once — like a switch. She stopped so hard it was almost comical, except nothing about it was funny.
Her eyes flicked to mine, then down to the label, then back up again.
In that instant, she wasn’t the Charli who laughed in Wardrobe. She was braced. Waiting for the cost.
“Where did you get it?”
I kept my voice low. Steady.
Charli’s throat moved. “I—”
“Charli.” I said her name like a hand on a shoulder. “Answer me.”
“Online,” she whispered.
“How long?”
Her eyes dropped.
“How long,” I repeated — softer, not less firm.
“Almost four months.”
The number landed in my body before it landed in my mind. Four months of private courage. Four months of private risk. Four months of her building a life on something she couldn’t afford to lose.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Her fingers twisted into the towel. She didn’t look up.
“I didn’t want…” Her voice cracked. “I didn’t want it to go away.”
“What,” I asked, gently and dangerously, “didn’t you want to go away?”
And then she said it — not neatly, not bravely. Just honestly: the girls, the room, me. The terror of biology catching up with her.
I let her finish. I made myself let her finish.
“Okay,” I said at last. “Listen to me.”
I put my hand over the bottle — not dramatic. Not possessive. Simply claiming responsibility.
“I’m taking this,” I said. “Not as punishment. As harm control.”
Her breath hitched.
“We are not doing this alone, Charli.”
Scene 30 a¶
The Brush¶
[26-01-22]
Scene 30 — “The Brush” (Celeste POV) — Revised Pass
Wardrobe had learned, over the last three months, to run like a body instead of a panic. Not because the work was easier—if anything it had become more precise, more demanding—but because the women inside it had stopped wasting effort on uncertainty.
Tools had homes. Labels existed. The ledger sat where it belonged: open when it needed to be open, shut when it didn’t. Even Mara’s silences had started to feel less like weather and more like method.
And Charli?
Charli moved through the room as if she’d finally stopped waiting to be told she was in the way.
She arrived early, same as always, but the early-ness had changed. It used to feel like an apology; now it felt like preference. She hung her bag on the hook without flinching. Washed her hands with the same thoroughness, but without the old tremor of performance. She laughed sometimes, quietly, and the laugh stayed in the air instead of disappearing the second it appeared.
She had become easier to look at. Not because she was “prettier” or because she was trying harder.
Because she was less afraid.
Mara set the next test on the table without ceremony: a cap and kerchief combination we’d been refining for the Faire women—something that had to survive heat, sweat, pins, movement, and the indignity of being yanked off and shoved into a tote bag between scenes.
“Hair,” Mara said, glancing at Charli as if the word was a tool she was calling for. “Fix it.”
Charli touched her own hair reflexively, as if the problem had just been named aloud. She had tied it back in her customary scruffy ponytail. It was not with the discipline the cap required. Loose strands would catch. Pins would slip. The whole thing would migrate.
Tahlia, measuring a sleeve nearby, made a small amused noise. Lucy didn’t look up from her work. Sarah, perched like a crow on a stool, watched with the bright interest she reserved for social developments.
Charli stepped toward the mirror with a comb, uncertain.
I moved without thinking.
“Sit.”
Charli looked at me as if I’d told her to walk into the ocean. Then she sat—carefully, obediently—still holding her breath a little, like she wasn’t sure she’d earned the chair.
I reached for the brush. It was ordinary: wooden handle, bristles clogged with hair. When I drew it through her hair the first time, Charli went very still.
Not tense. Not flinching.
Attentive.
The brush made that low, dry sound a brush makes on clean, long hair. I worked from the ends up, practical. Untangle. Smooth. Part. No pulling. No fuss.
“Hold your head,” I said. “Don’t tip back.”
“Yes,” she murmured, and then—an old reflex, soft as a bruise: “Sorry.”
I stopped the brush for half a beat and shook my head.
“Don’t apologise,” I said, flat. Not harsh. Just final. “Just hold still.”
“Okay.”
The room didn’t pause around us.
I gathered her hair at the nape, measured the tension with my fingers, and began to twist it into a coil that would sit properly beneath the cap. Pins went in with the same economy we used for everything: enough to hold, not so many it became a hedgehog. Sarah’s voice floated over from her stool.
“Look at that,” she said, pleased. “Civilisation.”
Charli smiled—an actual smile that reached her eyes.
Lucy looked up long enough to say, “If she keeps her head like that, the cap will sit properly. If she doesn’t, it’ll ride.”
“Thank you,” Charli said automatically.
Lucy’s expression remained what it always was. “It’s just geometry.”
I set the cap on Charli’s head and adjusted the angle. The kerchief followed, tied firmly enough to hold, not so tight it would dig. I checked the line at the forehead, the way the fabric framed her face.
For a second—only a second—I saw it.
Not a costume. Not a test.
A rightness so quiet it almost made me swallow.
As if the room around her had finally stopped arguing with something inside her body.
“Turn your head left.”
She turned.
“Right.”
She turned.
“Good.”
Mara glanced over, saw the fit, and gave a single curt nod: approval, in Mara’s language.
“Now move,” Mara said. “Sweat. Bend. Prove it.”
Charli rose and began the wear-test—bending to reach fabric on the lower shelves, turning quickly, lifting her arms, moving through the narrow spaces between tables. The cap held. The kerchief held. The pins did their job.
Tahlia watched her with a faint grin. Bree appeared in the doorway mid-test, took one look, and beamed.
“Oh, she looks proper Missy!”
The room laughed, and I saw Charli go pink: a soft, bashful warmth.
Bree clapped once, delighted. “Right then. She’s coming tonight.”
“She’s coming,” Tahlia echoed.
The day moved on.
The cap survived sweat and motion. The kerchief didn’t slip. The ledger received its notes. Mara’s shears kept snicking. The room kept laughing.
And Charli kept laughing with it.
Not small.
Real.
That evening, at home, the quiet hit me the way it always did after Wardrobe: like walking out of a river and realising your ears had been full of water.
Charli was in the shower. I could hear the muted rush behind the bathroom door, the steady sound of water striking tile. I moved through the apartment, tidying without thinking. Habit. Reset the space. Put things back where they belonged.
Her bag was on the chair.
Not rummaged through. Not spilled open. Just… placed there, as if it had been arranged to look casual.
I don’t know what made me look. It wasn’t suspicion, not at first. It was the same part of my brain that noticed seam strain and pin tension—the part that registered when something was slightly too controlled.
I lifted the bag and felt the weight shift in a way that didn’t match fabric.
I opened it.
Inside, tucked under folded cloth and a small notebook, was a pharmacy bottle. White plastic. Printed label.
My stomach dropped before my mind caught up.
Spironolactone.
The name sat on the label like a fact that refused to be softened by context. I’d heard of it—an anti-androgen, a testosterone blocker. Prescription-only.
It was almost empty. Empty enough to make the decision behind it feel old, not impulsive.
She had told me nothing about this.
My first impulse was anger: hot and sharp and immediate.
Not at her.
At the risk.
At the secrecy.
At the thought of her taking anything unsupervised, unmonitored, unrecorded—her body becoming a private experiment without safeguards, without bloodwork, without anyone checking what it was doing to her.
And then a colder realisation arrived, steady enough to make me still: this wasn’t rebellion.
This was a solution.
A private solution. Her solution.
A girl trying to keep her place in a room of women by any means available.
I closed the bag carefully, as if the bottle might explode.
Then I opened it again and took the bottle out. There was no point pretending I hadn’t seen it. There was no point leaving it there like a trap. The bottle was evidence; it represented danger.
I set it on the kitchen table and waited.
The shower stopped. A door opened. Footsteps. The soft sound of Charli’s towel rubbing through her hair.
She came into the kitchen in a t-shirt and track pants, damp hair loose around her shoulders, face relaxed in a way I hadn’t seen months ago. She looked… good. Warmer. Lighter.
Then she saw the bottle.
All the light left her face. She stopped so abruptly it was like she’d hit a wall. Her eyes flicked to mine, then down to the bottle, then back up to my face.
In that moment, she wasn’t Charli of the workroom—laughing, included, adopted.
She was braced. Terrified. Trying to calculate what it would cost to be caught wanting.
“Where did you get it?”
My voice came out quiet. Low. The way you speak when you’re trying not to add fear to fear.
Charli’s throat moved. “I—”
“Charli.” I said her name like a hand placed firmly on a shoulder. “Answer me.”
She swallowed. “Online.”
“How long?”
Her eyes dropped.
“How long,” I repeated, and I heard my own restraint in it—how carefully I was keeping the edge out. She breathed in, shallow.
“Almost four months.”
Four months.
Long enough for it to become her routine. Long enough for it to affect her body. Long enough for her to build her happiness on it.
I let my breath out through my nose, slow.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Charli’s hands twisted in the edge of her towel. She didn’t look up.
“I didn’t want…” she began, and her voice cracked. “I didn’t want it to go away.”
“Didn’t want what to go away?”
The question wasn’t cruel. But it had weight; it made her shiver. She shook her head, eyes bright.
“The… the girls. The room. You. I didn’t want…” She took in a shuddering breath. Then the words came spilling out, messy and honest.
“I was changing. It was horrible. The changes I didn’t think would happen were… happening. It made me sick. I was scared I was going to turn…”
She didn’t finish.
She didn’t have to.
There it was.
Not vanity.
Fear.
Fear of being returned to the category that had always hurt, because biology was betraying her.
I felt something in me tighten—an instinct to step forward and wrap her up and promise everything at once.
I didn’t.
I forced myself to stay where I was, to keep my voice steady, to give her structure instead of comfort that would collapse the moment the next fear arrived.
“This is not how we do it,” I said. Slower than I wanted to. “This isn’t safe. This isn’t supervised.”
Charli flinched as if the words were a slap.
I softened the delivery without softening the boundary.
“You don’t get to do things to your body like a private trial and hope it works out.”
Her lips trembled. “But it was working.”
The way she said it—small, desperate—made my chest ache. Because of course it had been working. It had given her a sense of control. It had quieted the terror chewing at her. It had let her smile without fear.
And she had done it alone.
I reached out and put my hand over the bottle.
Not possessive. Not dramatic.
Simply covering it. Claiming responsibility.
“I’m taking this.”
Charli’s eyes widened. “No—” she whispered, panic and pleading chasing each other across her face.
“Yes.”
The word came out clean. Final.
Then, after a beat—because I could feel how hard she was trying not to fall apart—I added, quieter:
“Not as punishment.”
Her breath hitched.
“As harm control,” I said. “And because I’m not leaving you to manage this by yourself.”
Charli stared at me like she was trying to work out whether she’d heard that last part correctly.
“Look,” I said, and I kept my voice as gentle as I could without letting it turn vague, “you’re not being punished, Charli. But you cannot do this without medical oversight. Do you understand me?”
Her breath trembled in her throat. A long moment passed. Finally, she nodded, small.
“Yes,” she whispered.
I picked up my phone.
“Who are you calling?” she asked, voice tight.
“Your mum.”
Her face went white.
“Mum—”
“Charli, listen.” The firmness in my voice surprised me—because it was threaded with something else now, something I didn’t want her to see. “We are not doing this alone. We are not keeping secrets that can harm you. Your mum needs to know. We need to get you professional help.”
Charli seemed to shrink into herself. She sat silent while I retrieved my phone. When I returned to the kitchen, she looked like she’d stepped backward through time: shoulders rounded, towel clutched like armour, eyes shining with unspilled tears.
“Please don’t hate me.”
That was worse than finding the bottle.
I stepped closer. I wanted—instinctively—to comfort her with softness, to wrap her in reassurance until she stopped trembling.
And I could feel, in the same breath, the danger of that: how easily comfort could become a hook. How quickly she could learn to rely on me as a shelter instead of learning to stand.
So I anchored her with fact.
“Charli,” I said, “I don’t hate you.” I watched her swallow. “I am angry you did something unsafe. And I’m angry you thought you had to do it alone. But I do not hate you.”
A tear slid down her cheek. She wiped it away quickly, ashamed of it.
I dialled.
When Lauren answered, I didn’t waste words.
“I found spironolactone in Charli’s bag,” I said. “Charli got it online. She’s been taking it for months.”
A pause on the line—silence with weight.
Then Lauren’s voice, tight but present: “Is she okay right now?”
“She’s here,” I said. “She’s safe. But this can’t continue.”
Another pause. I could hear Lauren breathing—holding herself together the way mothers do when the world tries to fracture them.
“I’m coming over,” she said.
“Please,” I replied. “We need a plan. We need medical oversight—bloodwork, specialists. People who actually understand this. Whatever the pathway is from here, we do it properly.”
Lauren’s voice steadied on the word properly, as if she was grabbing it with both hands.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “Yes. We do it properly.”
I ended the call and looked at Charli.
She stood in the kitchen with her towel clutched to her chest, face raw, eyes frightened, fixed on me.
“We are going to get you help with this,” I said. “Not through online forums. Not through secrecy. This is a serious step.”
Charli nodded, the hopelessness slowly easing from her shoulders. Her red eyes sought mine. I held her gaze.
“This will be a series of boring appointments,” I said, letting the promise be what it was—structure, safety. “Questions. Paperwork. Waiting.”
Her mouth trembled.
“But it will be safe,” I finished. “And you won’t do it by yourself.”
“Okay.”
The word came out in a whisper. And in that whisper I heard everything she hadn’t said:
I’m tired of being afraid. I’m tired of pretending I don’t want this. I’m tired of losing whatever I touch.
“We start tomorrow.”
Charli nodded again.
In that nod I saw the return of the new Charli—the one who understood surrender to structure, structure she’d been craving, structure she’d tried to replace with a bottle and a secret.
In the ensuing quiet, the apartment felt like Wardrobe did when the lights went down: still, intentional, waiting.
And for the first time, I understood with a clarity that made me almost cold:
Whatever Charli had done to keep her happiness safe inside her own body—whatever solution she’d found—had become part of who she thought she was.
Taking it away was not just confiscating pills.
It was touching the scaffolding of her identity.
Which meant we would have to replace it with something real. Something supervised. Something that didn’t rely on fear.
And we would have to do it without breaking her.
Scene 30 Soft¶
The Brush [P]¶
[ Publishing ]
[26-01-22]
Scene 30 — “The Brush” (Celeste POV) — Soft-Romantic Undertone Pass
Wardrobe had learned, over the last three months, to run like a body instead of a panic. Not because the work was easier—if anything it had become more precise, more demanding—but because the women inside it had stopped wasting effort on uncertainty.
Tools had homes. Labels existed. The ledger sat where it belonged: open when it needed to be open, shut when it didn’t. Even Mara’s silences had started to feel less like weather and more like method.
And Charli?
Charli moved through the room as if she’d finally stopped waiting to be told she was in the way.
She arrived early, same as always, but the early-ness had changed. It used to feel like an apology; now it felt like preference. She hung her bag on the hook without flinching. Washed her hands with the same thoroughness, but without the old tremor of performance. She laughed sometimes, quietly, and the laugh stayed in the air instead of disappearing the second it appeared.
She had become easier to look at. Not because she was “prettier” or because she was trying harder.
Because she was less afraid.
And because—without meaning to—she’d begun to occupy her own skin as if it belonged to her.
Mara set the next test on the table without ceremony: a cap and kerchief combination we’d been refining for the Faire women—something that had to survive heat, sweat, pins, movement, and the indignity of being yanked off and shoved into a tote bag between scenes.
“Hair,” Mara said, glancing at Charli as if the word was a tool she was calling for. “Fix it.”
Charli touched her own hair reflexively, as if the problem had just been named aloud. She had tied it back in her customary scruffy ponytail. It was not with the discipline the cap required. Loose strands would catch. Pins would slip. The whole thing would migrate.
Tahlia, measuring a sleeve nearby, made a small amused noise. Lucy didn’t look up from her work. Sarah, perched like a crow on a stool, watched with the bright interest she reserved for social developments.
Charli stepped toward the mirror with a comb, uncertain.
I moved without thinking.
“Sit.”
Charli looked at me as if I’d told her to walk into the ocean. Then she sat—carefully, obediently—still holding her breath a little, like she wasn’t sure she’d earned the chair.
I reached for the brush. It was ordinary: wooden handle, bristles clogged with hair.
When I drew it through her hair the first time, Charli went very still.
Not tense. Not flinching.
Attentive.
That attention always did something to me. Not the attention itself—the way she trusted it. The way she let herself be guided without making a show of it.
The brush made that low, dry sound a brush makes on clean, long hair. I worked from the ends up, practical. Untangle. Smooth. Part. No pulling. No fuss.
“Hold your head,” I said. “Don’t tip back.”
“Yes,” she murmured, and then—an old reflex, soft as a bruise: “Sorry.”
I stopped the brush for half a beat.
“Don’t apologise,” I said. Flat. Not harsh. Just final. “Just hold still.”
“Okay.”
The room didn’t pause around us. Mara’s shears kept snicking. Fabric slid. Pins clicked. The kettle somewhere did what kettles do.
I gathered Charli’s hair at the nape, measured the tension with my fingers, and began to twist it into a coil that would sit properly beneath the cap. The nape of her neck was warm from the room and from the shower she’d clearly taken before coming in—clean, faintly soap-scented. My fingers registered it the way they registered everything: temperature, texture, compliance.
And then, annoyingly, something else: a small, involuntary tenderness that made me slow down by half a second.
Pins went in with the same economy we used for everything: enough to hold, not so many it became a hedgehog. Sarah’s voice floated over from her stool.
“Look at that,” she said, pleased. “Civilisation.”
Charli smiled—an actual smile that reached her eyes.
Lucy looked up long enough to say, “If she keeps her head like that, the cap will sit properly. If she doesn’t, it’ll ride.”
“Thank you,” Charli said automatically.
Lucy’s expression remained what it always was. “It’s just geometry.”
I set the cap on Charli’s head and adjusted the angle. The kerchief followed, tied firmly enough to hold, not so tight it would dig. I checked the line at the forehead, the way the fabric framed her face.
For a second—only a second—I saw it.
Not a costume. Not a test.
A rightness so quiet it almost made me swallow.
As if the room around her had finally stopped arguing with something inside her body.
I should have stepped back then. I should have treated it like any other fit check.
Instead, my hand lingered at her temple a fraction too long, flattening a flyaway strand that didn’t matter.
Charli didn’t move. She simply breathed, steady, as if she’d decided this was safe.
I made myself withdraw.
“Turn your head left.”
She turned.
“Right.”
She turned.
“Good.”
Mara glanced over, saw the fit, and gave a single curt nod: approval, in Mara’s language.
“Now move,” Mara said. “Sweat. Bend. Prove it.”
Charli rose and began the wear-test—bending to reach fabric on the lower shelves, turning quickly, lifting her arms, moving through the narrow spaces between tables. The cap held. The kerchief held. The pins did their job.
Tahlia watched her with a faint grin. Bree appeared in the doorway mid-test, took one look, and beamed.
“Oh, she looks proper Missy!”
The room laughed, and I saw Charli go pink: a soft, bashful warmth.
Bree clapped once, delighted. “Right then. She’s coming tonight.”
“She’s coming,” Tahlia echoed.
Charli glanced at me—just once—like she was checking whether I approved of tonight, not just the cap.
I gave her a small nod. Professional. Calm.
And felt, under that calm, the strange protective satisfaction of it.
The day moved on.
The cap survived sweat and motion. The kerchief didn’t slip. The ledger received its notes. Mara’s shears kept snicking. The room kept laughing.
And Charli kept laughing with it.
Not small.
Real.
That evening, at home, the quiet hit me the way it always did after Wardrobe: like walking out of a river and realising your ears had been full of water.
Charli was in the shower. I could hear the muted rush behind the bathroom door, the steady sound of water striking tile. I moved through the apartment, tidying without thinking. Habit. Reset the space. Put things back where they belonged.
Her bag was on the chair.
Not rummaged through. Not spilled open. Just… placed there, as if it had been arranged to look casual.
I don’t know what made me look. It wasn’t suspicion, not at first. It was the same part of my brain that noticed seam strain and pin tension—the part that registered when something was slightly too controlled.
I lifted the bag and felt the weight shift in a way that didn’t match fabric.
I opened it.
Inside, tucked under folded cloth and a small notebook, was a pharmacy bottle. White plastic. Printed label.
My stomach dropped before my mind caught up.
Spironolactone.
The name sat on the label like a fact that refused to be softened by context. I’d heard of it—an anti-androgen, a testosterone blocker. Prescription-only.
It was almost empty. Empty enough to make the decision behind it feel old, not impulsive.
For a moment I couldn’t move.
Not because I didn’t know what to do.
Because the first thought in me wasn’t policy or risk or responsibility.
It was: I could lose her.
Not in the abstract. Not in a headline. In my kitchen.
I shut that thought down so hard it felt like biting my own tongue.
My next impulse was anger: hot and sharp and immediate.
Not at her.
At the risk.
At the secrecy.
At the thought of her taking anything unsupervised, unmonitored, unrecorded—her body becoming a private experiment without safeguards, without bloodwork, without anyone checking what it was doing to her.
And then a colder realisation arrived, steady enough to make me still: this wasn’t rebellion.
This was a solution.
A private solution. Her solution.
A girl trying to keep her place in a room of women by any means available.
I closed the bag carefully, as if the bottle might explode.
Then I opened it again and took the bottle out. There was no point pretending I hadn’t seen it. There was no point leaving it there like a trap. The bottle was evidence; it represented danger.
I set it on the kitchen table and waited.
The shower stopped. A door opened. Footsteps. The soft sound of Charli’s towel rubbing through her hair.
She came into the kitchen in a t-shirt and track pants, damp hair loose around her shoulders, face relaxed in a way I hadn’t seen months ago. She looked… good. Warm. Lighter.
The sight of that warmth, arriving right before the fall, made something in me tighten.
Then she saw the bottle.
All the light left her face. She stopped so abruptly it was like she’d hit a wall. Her eyes flicked to mine, then down to the bottle, then back up.
In that moment, she wasn’t Charli of the workroom—laughing, included, adopted.
She was braced. Terrified. Trying to calculate what it would cost to be caught wanting.
“Where did you get it?”
My voice came out quiet. Low. The way you speak when you’re trying not to add fear to fear.
Charli’s throat moved. “I—”
“Charli.” I said her name like a hand placed firmly on a shoulder. “Answer me.”
She swallowed. “Online.”
“How long?”
Her eyes dropped.
“How long,” I repeated, and I heard my own restraint in it—how carefully I was keeping the edge out. She breathed in, shallow.
“Almost four months.”
Four months.
Long enough for it to become her routine. Long enough for it to affect her body. Long enough for her to build her happiness on it.
I let my breath out through my nose, slow.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Charli’s hands twisted in the edge of her towel. She didn’t look up.
“I didn’t want…” she began, and her voice cracked. “I didn’t want it to go away.”
“Didn’t want what to go away?”
The question wasn’t cruel. But it had weight; it made her shiver. She shook her head, eyes bright.
“The… the girls. The room. You. I didn’t want…” She took in a shuddering breath. Then the words came spilling out, messy and honest.
“I was changing. It was horrible. The changes I didn’t think would happen were… happening. It made me sick. I was scared I was going to turn…”
She didn’t finish.
She didn’t have to.
There it was.
Not vanity.
Fear.
Fear of being returned to the category that had always hurt, because biology was betraying her.
I felt that instinct again—sharp, urgent—an urge to close the distance, to put my arms around her and make her stop shaking.
And I hated myself, a little, for how badly I wanted it.
I didn’t move.
I forced myself to stay where I was, to keep my voice steady, to give her structure instead of comfort that would collapse the moment the next fear arrived.
“This is not how we do it,” I said. Slower than I wanted to. “This isn’t safe. This isn’t supervised.”
Charli flinched as if the words were a slap.
I softened the delivery without softening the boundary.
“You don’t get to do things to your body like a private trial and hope it works out.”
Her lips trembled. “But it was working.”
The way she said it—small, desperate—made my chest ache. Because of course it had been working. It had given her a sense of control. It had quieted the terror chewing at her. It had let her smile without fear.
And she had done it alone.
I reached out and put my hand over the bottle.
Not possessive. Not dramatic.
Simply covering it. Claiming responsibility.
“I’m taking this.”
Charli’s eyes widened. “No—” she whispered, panic and pleading chasing each other across her face.
“Yes.”
The word came out clean. Final.
Then, after a beat—because I could see her tipping toward panic—I added, quieter:
“Not as punishment.”
Her breath hitched.
“As harm control,” I said. “And because I’m not leaving you to manage this by yourself.”
Charli stared at me like she was trying to work out whether she’d heard that last part correctly.
“Look,” I said, and I kept my voice as gentle as I could without letting it turn vague, “you’re not being punished, Charli. But you cannot do this without medical oversight. Do you understand me?”
Her breath trembled in her throat. A long moment passed. Finally, she nodded, small.
“Yes,” she whispered.
I picked up my phone.
“Who are you calling?” she asked, voice tight.
“Your mum.”
Her face went white.
“Mum—”
“Charli, listen.” The firmness in my voice surprised me—because it was threaded with something else now, something I didn’t want her to see. “We are not doing this alone. We are not keeping secrets that can harm you. Your mum needs to know. We need to get you professional help.”
Charli seemed to shrink into herself. She sat silent while I retrieved my phone. When I returned to the kitchen, she looked like she’d stepped backward through time: shoulders rounded, towel clutched like armour, eyes shining with unspilled tears.
“Please don’t hate me.”
That was worse than finding the bottle.
I stepped closer. I wanted—instinctively—to comfort her with softness, to wrap her in reassurance until she stopped trembling.
And I could feel, in the same breath, the danger of that: how easily comfort could become a hook. How quickly she could learn to rely on me as a shelter instead of learning to stand.
So I anchored her with fact.
“Charli,” I said, “I don’t hate you.” I watched her swallow. “I am angry you did something unsafe. And I’m angry you thought you had to do it alone. But I do not hate you.”
A tear slid down her cheek. She wiped it away quickly, ashamed of it.
I dialled.
When Lauren answered, I didn’t waste words.
“I found spironolactone in Charli’s bag,” I said. “Charli got it online. She’s been taking it for months.”
A pause on the line—silence with weight.
Then Lauren’s voice, tight but present: “Is she okay right now?”
“She’s here,” I said. “She’s safe. But this can’t continue.”
Another pause. I could hear Lauren breathing—holding herself together the way mothers do when the world tries to fracture them.
“I’m coming over,” she said.
“Please,” I replied. “We need a plan. We need medical oversight—bloodwork, specialists. People who actually understand this. Whatever the pathway is from here, we do it properly.”
Lauren’s voice steadied on the word properly, as if she was grabbing it with both hands.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “Yes. We do it properly.”
I ended the call and looked at Charli.
She stood in the kitchen with her towel clutched to her chest, face raw, eyes frightened, fixed on me.
“We are going to get you help with this,” I said. “Not through online forums. Not through secrecy. This is a serious step.”
Charli nodded, the hopelessness slowly easing from her shoulders. Her red eyes sought mine.
I held her gaze.
And I let myself, for one heartbeat, simply look at her—at the damp hair, the bare face, the trembling mouth—as if this were not a problem to manage but a person I… cared about more than I had planned to.
I put that away again before it could soften me into uselessness.
“This will be a series of boring appointments,” I said, letting the promise be what it was—structure, safety. “Questions. Paperwork. Waiting.”
Her mouth trembled.
“But it will be safe,” I finished. “And you won’t do it by yourself.”
“Okay.”
The word came out in a whisper. And in that whisper I heard everything she hadn’t said:
I’m tired of being afraid. I’m tired of pretending I don’t want this. I’m tired of losing whatever I touch.
“We start tomorrow.”
Charli nodded again.
In that nod I saw the return of the new Charli—the one who understood surrender to structure, structure she’d been craving, structure she’d tried to replace with a bottle and a secret.
In the ensuing quiet, the apartment felt like Wardrobe did when the lights went down: still, intentional, waiting.
And for the first time, I understood with a clarity that made me almost cold:
Whatever Charli had done to keep her happiness safe inside her own body—whatever solution she’d found—had become part of who she thought she was.
Taking it away was not just confiscating pills.
It was touching the scaffolding of her identity.
Which meant we would have to replace it with something real. Something supervised. Something that didn’t rely on fear.
And we would have to do it without breaking her.
hr style="height:4px;border-width:0;color:pink;background-color:pink">
Vignette 1¶
Removing Danger¶
✨ The Brush ✨ Charli stared in front of her. A tear slid down her cheek. She didn’t lift a hand to wipe it away—hands folded in her lap as if even that small movement might tip her into pieces.
I felt that instinct again—sharp, urgent—the urge to close the distance, to put my arms around her and make her stop shaking. I hated how badly I wanted it.
But I didn’t move.
I made myself stay where I was. This was time for structure, not comfort.
“This is not how to do it,” I said, forcing my voice slow. Calm. “This isn’t safe. It isn’t supervised.”
The word hung between us.
She didn’t look up.
I watched her breathe—little, uneven pulls—as if the air had turned heavy.
And then I saw it. Not just fear. Grief. The kind that comes when something precious is threatened.
My tone softened before I even decided to let it.
“Is it…” I began carefully, testing the surface. “Is it because you’re scared the girls will stop… seeing you?”
Her whole body recoiled. A shudder, instant and involuntary—as if the idea itself was poison.
“Don’t,” she whispered.
I nodded once. An apology without saying sorry.
“Okay,” I said. “Not that.”
I kept my eyes on her face, not to interrogate, but to hold steady for her.
“Then tell me what it was,” I said, quieter. “Not what you were afraid they would think. What it felt like in you.”
Her mouth trembled. She swallowed.
“It was horrible,” she managed. “The changes I didn’t think would happen were… happening.” Her voice cracked. “It made me sick.”
“Sick,” I echoed softly—not correcting, not translating. “Like nausea?”
A tiny nod.
“Like panic?”
Another nod, sharper.
“Like…” I chose the words with care, as if they were glass. “Like your body didn’t feel like yours anymore.”
That did it. Her breath broke.
“Yes.” The word came out small and raw, and then she shook her head like she couldn’t bear the rest. “I didn’t want it to… to go away.”
“Didn’t want what to go away?” I asked—direct, but not hard. The question had weight, yes, but it wasn’t a blow. It was a handrail.
She closed her eyes, eyes bright when they opened again.
“The… the girls. The room. You.” She drew in a shuddering breath. “I didn’t want—” The words spilled, messy and honest. “I didn’t want me to go away.”
Something in me stilled.
“I believe you,” I said immediately.
Her shoulders dropped a fraction, as if that sentence had taken some of the load.
“And,” I added, because love without structure would be a lie, “we don’t answer that kind of fear with secrecy.”
She flinched again, smaller this time.
“We answer it properly,” I said. “With supervision. With bloodwork. With someone watching what your body is doing—so you don’t have to be brave in the dark.”
Her lower lip trembled.
“You’re going to take it away,” she whispered.
I shook my head, slow.
“I’m going to take away the alone part,” I said. “Not your life.”
Vignette 2¶
From Robyn¶
✨ The Brush ✨
Her lips trembled. “But it was working.”
The way she said it—small, desperate—made my chest ache. Because of course it had been working. It had given her a sense of control. It had quieted the terror chewing at her. It had let her smile without fear.
And she had done it alone. I reached out and put my hand over the bottle. Not possessive. Not dramatic. Simply covering it. Claiming responsibility.
“I’m taking this.”
Charli’s eyes widened. “No—” she whispered, panic and pleading chasing each other across her face.
“Yes.”
The word came out clean. Final.
Then, after a beat—because I could see her tipping toward panic—I added, quieter: “Not as punishment.”
Her breath hitched.
“As harm control,” I said. “And because I’m not leaving you to manage this by yourself.”
Charli stared at me like she was trying to work out whether she’d heard that last part correctly.
“Look,” I said, and I kept my voice as gentle as I could without letting it turn vague, “you’re not being punished, Charli. But you cannot do this without medical oversight. Do you understand me?”
Her breath trembled in her throat. A long moment passed. Finally, she nodded, small.
“Yes,” she whispered.
I picked up my phone.
“Who are you calling?” she asked, voice tight.
“Your mum.”
Her face went white.
“Mum—”
“Charli, listen.” The firmness in my voice surprised me—because it was threaded with something else now, something I didn’t want her to see. “We are not doing this alone. We are not keeping secrets that can harm you. Your mum needs to know. We need to get you professional help.”
Charli seemed to shrink into herself. She sat silent while I retrieved my phone. When I returned to the kitchen, she looked like she’d stepped backward through time: shoulders rounded, towel clutched like armour, eyes shining with unspilled tears.
“Please don’t hate me.”
That was worse than finding the bottle.
I stepped closer. I wanted—instinctively—to comfort her with softness, to wrap her in reassurance until she stopped trembling.
And I could feel, in the same breath, the danger of that: how easily comfort could become a hook. How quickly she could learn to rely on me as a shelter instead of learning to stand.
So I anchored her with fact.
“Charli,” I said, “I don’t hate you.” I watched her swallow. “I am angry you did something unsafe. And I’m angry you thought you had to do it alone. But I do not hate you.”
A tear slid down her cheek. She wiped it away quickly, ashamed of it.
I dialled.
Vignette 3¶
xx¶
Revised version¶
(Charli compliant, relief present, Celeste steady + soft)
Her lips trembled. “But it was working.”
The way she said it—small, frightened—made my chest ache. Because of course it had been working. It had given her a sense of control. It had quieted the terror chewing at her. It had let her inhabit herself without flinching.
And she had done it alone.
I didn’t reach for the bottle like it was contraband. I reached for it the way you reach for a hot pan when someone’s about to burn themselves—quick, careful, without theatrics.
I laid my hand over it.
Not possessive. Not dramatic.
Just… covering it. Taking responsibility.
“I’m taking this,” I said.
Charli’s eyes widened, but there wasn’t fight in them. Just a rush of fear—then a pause, like she was testing whether I meant what I’d said before.
I kept my voice quiet.
“Not as punishment.”
Her breath hitched.
“As harm control,” I said. “And because I’m not leaving you to manage this by yourself.”
She stared at my hand on the bottle as if the room had shifted and she was trying to find her footing.
Then, very softly, as if saying it might undo it:
“…You’re not angry at me?”
The question turned my throat tight.
“I’m angry you were put in a position where this felt like your only option,” I said. “And I’m angry you did it without oversight.” I held her gaze. “But I’m not angry at you for wanting your life.”
Her shoulders sagged—just a fraction. Relief, thin and trembling, but real.
“Look at me,” I said, gentler than I meant to be. “You are not being punished, Charli. But you cannot do this without medical supervision. Do you understand me?”
She nodded, small, immediate.
“Yes.”
I picked up my phone.
Her voice went tight again. “What… what are you doing?”
“I’m calling your mum.”
The colour drained from her face.
“Mum—”
“I know.” I kept my tone calm, almost tender, because this was the part that would feel like falling. “This is the grown-up part, okay? Not because you’re in trouble. Because this needs to be safe.”
Charli swallowed. Her hands curled into the towel on her lap, knuckles whitening, but she didn’t pull away from me. She didn’t argue. She just sat very still, trying to be brave in the open.
“I don’t want her to think…” She couldn’t finish.
“I won’t let her think the wrong thing,” I said. “I’m going to tell her the truth: that you were scared, and you tried to solve it, and it has to be supervised.”
Her eyes shone—tears held stubbornly in place.
“You’ll stay?” she whispered, and hated herself for asking even as the words left her.
My chest tightened.
“Yes,” I said simply. “I’m right here.”
She nodded again, like she was filing it away as a fact she could survive on.
I dialled.
While it rang, Charli stared at the tabletop as if she could anchor herself there. One tear slid down her cheek. This time she didn’t wipe it away. She just let it fall—quiet, unperformed—while I kept my voice steady and made the call.
Scene 30¶
“The Brush”¶
✨ The Brush ✨
[Celeste]
Wardrobe had learned, over the last three months, to run like a body instead of a panic. Not because the work was easier—if anything it had become more precise, more demanding—but because the women inside it had stopped wasting effort on uncertainty. Tools had homes. Labels existed. The ledger sat where it belonged: open when it needed to be open, shut when it didn’t. Even Mara’s silences had started to feel less like weather and more like method.
And Charli?
Charli moved through the room as if she’d finally stopped expecting to be told she was in the way.
She arrived early, same as always, but the early-ness had changed. It used to feel like an apology; now it felt like preference. She hung her bag on the hook, washed her hands with the same thoroughness, but without the old tremor of performance. She laughed sometimes, quietly, and the laugh stayed in the air instead of disappearing the second it appeared.
She had become easier to look at, not because she was “prettier” but because she was less afraid. And because she’d begun to occupy her skin like it belonged to her.
Mara set the next test on the table without ceremony: a cap and kerchief combination we’d been refining for the Faire women, an accessory that had to survive heat, sweat, pins, movement, and the indignity of being yanked off and shoved into a tote bag between scenes.
“Hair,” Mara said, glancing at Charli as if hair was a tool to call for. “Fix it.”
Charli touched her hair reflexively, as if a problem had just been identified. She had tied it back in her customary scruffy ponytail. It was not with the discipline the cap required. Loose strands would catch. Pins would slip. The cap would migrate.
Tahlia, measuring a sleeve nearby, made a small amused noise. Lucy didn’t look up from her work. Sarah, perched like a crow on a stool, watched with the bright interest she reserved for social developments.
Charli stepped toward the mirror with a comb with an uncertain bite of the lips.
I moved without thinking.
“Sit.”
Charli looked at me as if I’d told her to do a pirouette. Then she sat—carefully, obediently—still holding her breath a little, with unsure sidelong glances. I reached for the brush: an ordinary, wooden-handled thing, bristles clogged with hair.
When I drew it through her hair the first time, Charli went very still. Not tense or flinching: attentive.
That attention always did something to me. Not the attention itself but the way she was trusting me. The way she let herself be guided without making a show of it.
The brush made that low, dry sound a brush makes on clean, long hair. I worked from the ends up, practical. Untangle. Smooth. Part. No pulling. No fuss.
“Hold your head,” I said. “Don’t tip back.”
“Yes,” she murmured, and then—an old reflex, soft as a bruise: “Sorry.”
I stopped the brush for half a beat and shook my head.
“Don’t apologise. Just hold still.”
“Okay.”
The room didn’t pause around us. Mara’s shears kept snicking. Fabric slid. Pins clicked. The kettle somewhere did what kettles do. I gathered Charli’s hair at the nape, measured the tension with my fingers, and began to twist it into a coil that would sit properly beneath the cap. The nape of her neck was warm from the room and from the shower she’d clearly taken before coming in—clean, faintly soap-scented. My fingers registered it the way they registered everything: temperature, texture, compliance.
And then, annoyingly, something else—a small, involuntary tenderness—welled inside: it slowed me for half a second.
Pins went in with the same economy we used for everything: enough to hold, not so many a hairdo became a hedgehog. Sarah’s voice floated over from her stool.
“Look at that,” she said, pleased. “She looks... civilised.”
Charli smiled, an actual smile, one that reached her eyes.
Lucy looked up long enough to say, “If she keeps her hair like that, the cap will sit properly. If she doesn’t, it’ll ride.”
“Thank you,” Charli said automatically.
Lucy shrugged. “It’s just geometry.”
I set the cap on Charli’s head and adjusted the angle. The kerchief followed, tied firmly enough to hold, not so tight it would dig. I checked the line at the forehead, the way the fabric framed her face.
For a second, only a second, I saw it. This was not Charli donning a costume. No, there was a rightness... so quiet yet so clearly there, it made me swallow. She fit into the room around her, which had finally stopped arguing about it.
I should have stepped back then. I should have treated it like any other fit check. Instead, my hand lingered at her temple a fraction too long, flattening a flyaway strand that didn’t actually matter. Charli didn’t move. She simply breathed, steadily, as if she knew this was safe. She was safe.
I made myself withdraw.
“Turn your head left.”
She turned.
“Right.”
She turned.
“Good.”
Mara glanced over, saw the fit, and gave a single curt nod: approval, in Mara’s language.
“Now move,” Mara said. “Sweat. Bend. Prove it.”
Charli rose and began the wear-test: bending to reach fabric on the lower shelves, turning quickly, lifting her arms, moving through the narrow spaces between tables. The cap held. The kerchief held. The pins did their job. Tahlia watched her with a faint grin. Bree appeared in the doorway mid-test, took one look, and beamed.
“Oh, she looks proper Missy!”
The room laughed, and I saw Charli go pink: a soft, bashful warmth. Bree clapped once, delighted.
“Right then. She’s coming tonight... aren't you, petal?”
“She’s coming,” Tahlia agreed.
Charli gave me a quick side-long glance, like she was checking whether I approved of tonight, not just the cap. I gave her a small nod. Calm. And felt, under that calm, a strangely protective satisfaction.
The day moved on.
The cap survived sweat and motion. The kerchief didn’t slip. The ledger received its notes. Mara’s shears kept snicking. The room kept laughing. And Charli kept laughing with it. Not small.
Real.
That evening, at home, the quiet enveloped me the way it always did after Wardrobe: like walking out of a river and realising your ears had been full of water.
Charli was in the shower. I could hear the muted rush behind the bathroom door, the steady sound of water striking tile. I moved through the apartment, tidying without thinking. Habit. Reset the space. Put things back where they belonged.
Her bag was on the chair. Not thrown there: placed, as if it had been arranged to look casual.
I don’t know what made me look. It wasn’t suspicion, just the same part of my brain that notices seam strain and pin tension. It was the part that registered when something was slightly too controlled. I lifted the bag and felt the weight shift in a way that didn’t match fabric.
I opened it.
Inside, tucked under folded cloth and a small notebook, was a pharmacy bottle. White plastic. Printed label.
My stomach dropped.
Spironolactone.
The name sat on the label like a fact that refused to be softened by context. I’d heard of it... an anti-androgen, a testosterone blocker. Prescription-only.
It was almost empty. Empty enough to make the decision behind it feel old, not impulsive.
For a moment I couldn’t move: not because I didn’t know what to do, but because the first thought wasn’t policy or risk or responsibility. It was:
I could lose her.
Not in the abstract. Not in a headline. In my kitchen.
I shut that thought down so hard it felt like I’d bitten my own tongue.
My next impulse was anger: hot and sharp and immediate.
Not at her. At the risk.
At the secrecy.
At the thought of her taking anything unsupervised, unmonitored, unrecorded. That she felt she had to do this—put herself into unwitnessed triage—no safeguards, no bloodwork, no one watching the numbers—no one checking what it was doing to her.
That awakened a colder realisation, steady enough to make me still: this wasn’t rebellion.
This was a solution.
A private solution. Her solution.
A girl trying to keep her place in a room of women by any means available.
I closed the bag carefully, as if the bottle might explode.
Then I opened it again and took the bottle out. There was no point pretending I hadn’t seen it. There was no point leaving it there like a trap. The bottle was evidence; it represented danger. I set it on the kitchen table and waited.
The shower stopped. A door opened. Footsteps. The soft sound of Charli’s towel rubbing through her hair. She came into the kitchen in a t-shirt and 'trackies', damp hair loose around her shoulders, face relaxed in a way I hadn’t seen months ago.
She looked... good. Warm. Light. The sight of that warmth, that lightness, made something in me hold its breath.
Then she saw the bottle.
All the light left her face.
She stopped so abruptly it was like she’d hit a wall. Her eyes, widening with fear, flicked to mine, then down to the bottle, then back up. In that moment, she wasn’t Charli of the workroom... laughing, included, adopted. She was bracing... terrified.
Trying to calculate what it would happen next.
“Where did you get it?”
My voice came out quiet. Low. The way you speak when you’re trying not to add fear to fear.
Charli’s throat moved. “I—” She paused.
“Charli.” I said her name like a hand placed firmly on a shoulder. “Answer me.”
She swallowed. “Online.”
“How long?”
Her eyes dropped.
“How long,” I repeated, and I heard my own restraint in it, how carefully I was keeping the edge out. She breathed in, shallow.
“Almost four months.” Her voice was so soft, I could barely hear it. But the words were as loud in my head as if she'd screamed them.
Four months.
Long enough for it to become her routine. Long enough for it to affect her body. Long enough for her to build her happiness on it. I let my breath out through my nose, slow, fighting to stay calm.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Charli’s hands twisted in the edge of her towel. She didn’t look up.
“I didn’t want...” she began, and her voice cracked. “I didn’t want it to... to go away.”
“Didn’t want what to go away?”
The question wasn’t meant to be unkind: it was necessary—plain and steady—and it landed with weight; it made her shiver.
“The... the girls. The room. You. I didn’t want...” She took in a shuddering breath, her eyes bright with unshed tears. The words came spilling out, messy and honest.
“I was changing. It was horrible. The changes I didn’t think would happen were... happening. It made me sick. I was scared I was going to...”
She didn’t finish.
She didn’t have to.
There it was.
Not vanity.
Fear.
Fear of being returned to the life that had always hurt, just because biology was betraying her.
“This is not how to do it.” I forced myself to speak slowly, calmly. “This isn’t safe. It isn’t supervised.”
Charli stared in front of her. A tear slid down her cheek. She didn’t lift a hand to wipe it away—hands folded in her lap as if even that small movement might tip her into pieces.
I felt that instinct again—sharp, urgent—the urge to close the distance, to put my arms around her and make her stop shaking. I hated how badly I wanted it.
But I didn’t move.
I made myself stay where I was. I watched her breathe—little, uneven pulls—as if the air had turned heavy. And then I saw it.
Not just fear.
Grief.
The kind that comes when something precious is threatened. My tone softened before I even decided to let it.
“Is it...” I began carefully, testing the surface. “Is it because you’re scared the girls will stop... seeing you?”
She shook her head. I nodded: an apology without saying sorry.
“Okay,” I said. “Not that.” I kept my eyes on her face, not to interrogate, but to hold steady for her.
“Then tell me what it was,” I said, quieter. “Not what you were afraid they would think. What it felt like in you.”
Her mouth trembled. She swallowed.
“It was horrible,” she managed. “The changes... I didn’t think they would happen, but they were... happening.” Her voice cracked. “It made me sick.”
“Sick,” I echoed softly, genuinely puzzled. “Like nausea?”
A tiny nod. I felt my mouth drop open as a realisation struck.
“Like panic?”
Another nod, sharper.
“Like...” I chose the words with care, as if they were glass. “Like your body... didn’t feel like... yours anymore.”
That did it. Her breath broke.
“Yes.” The word came out small and raw, and then she shook her head like she couldn’t bear the rest. “I didn’t want it to... to be different.” She drew in a shuddering breath. “I didn’t want me to go away.”
Something in me stilled.
“I believe you,” I said quietly. Her shoulders dropped a fraction, as if I had taken some of her load. “And,” I added, because love without structure would be a lie, “we don’t answer that kind of fear with secrecy. We answer it properly, with supervision. With bloodwork. With someone watching what your body is doing—so you don’t have to be brave in the dark.”
Her lower lip trembled, her red eyes on the bottle.
“But you’re going to take it away,” she whispered.
I shook my head, slow.
“No, I’m only going to take away the alone part,” I said. “Not your life.”
Her lips trembled. “The medicine was working.”
The way she said it—small, frightened—made my chest ache. Because of course it had been working. It had given her a sense of control. It had quieted the terror chewing at her. It had let her inhabit herself without flinching.
And she had done it alone.
I didn’t reach for the bottle like it was contraband. I reached for it the way you reach for a hot pan when someone’s about to burn themselves—quick, careful, without theatrics. I laid my hand over it. Not possessive or dramatic. Just... covering it. Taking responsibility.
Charli’s eyes widened, but there wasn’t fight in them. Just a rush of fear—then a pause, like she was testing whether I meant what I’d said before. She stared at my hand on the bottle as if the room had shifted and she was trying to find her footing. Then, very softly, as if saying it might undo it:
“You’re not angry at me?”
The question tightened my throat. My eyes burned. I couldn’t let tears take the wheel—not now—but the terror of the road she’d taken alone rose up so fast it made me dizzy. I shook my head.
“I’m angry you were put in a position where this felt like your only option,” I said. “And I’m angry you did it without oversight.” I held her gaze. “But I’m not angry at you for wanting your life.”
Her shoulders sagged—just a fraction. Relief, thin and trembling, but real.
“Look at me, Charli,” I said, gentler than I meant to be. “This is your life. I’m not taking it out of your hands—I’m making sure you don’t have to do everything alone. We need medical supervision. Do you understand?”
She nodded, small, immediate.
“Yes.”
I picked up my phone.
“What... what are you doing?” Her voice had gone tight again.
“I’m calling your mum.”
The colour drained from her face.
“Mum—”
“I know.” I kept my tone calm, almost tender, because this was the part that would feel like falling. “This is the grown-up part, okay? Not because you’re in trouble: because this needs to be safe.”
Charli swallowed. Her hands curled into the towel on her lap, knuckles whitening, but she didn’t pull away from me. She didn’t argue. She just sat very still, trying to be brave.
“I didn’t want her to think...” She couldn’t finish.
“I won’t let her think the wrong thing,” I said. “I’m going to tell her the truth: that you were scared, and you tried to solve it, and it has to be supervised.”
Her eyes shone again with tears she held stubbornly in place.
I dialled.
While it rang, Charli stared at the tabletop as if she could anchor herself there. One tear slid down her cheek: she didn’t wipe it away. She just let it fall—quiet, unperformed—while I kept my voice steady and made the call.
When Lauren answered, I didn’t waste words.
“I found a medication in Charli’s bag,” I said. “An anti-androgen—spironolactone. She’s been getting it without a clinician involved. She’s been taking it for months.”
There was a pause on the line, a silence with weight. Then Lauren’s voice, tight but present.
“Is she okay right now?”
“If you mean physically, she seems okay,” I said. “She’s stable—breathing fine, coherent, not fainting or anything like that. But she’s been frightened, Lauren. She tried to handle something alone that shouldn’t be handled alone. I’ve secured the medication and I’m right here with her. Next step is medical oversight—bloodwork, a plan—as soon as we can.”
Another pause. I could hear Lauren breathing, holding herself together the way mothers do when the world tries to fracture them.
“I’m coming over.”
“Please,” I replied. “We need a plan. Specialists. People who actually understand this. Whatever the pathway is from here, we do it properly.”
Lauren’s voice steadied on the word 'properly', as if grabbing it with both hands.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “Yes. We do it properly.”
I ended the call and looked at Charli. She stood in the kitchen with her towel clutched to her chest, face raw, frightened eyes fixed on me.
“We are going to get you help with this, Charli,” I said. “The right way. The proper way. Your happiness is important.”
Charli nodded, the hopelessness slowly easing from her shoulders. Her red eyes sought mine.
I held her gaze.
And I let myself, for one heartbeat, simply look at her—at the damp hair, the bare face, the trembling mouth—and realised with a gut-wrenching suddenness: this were not a problem to manage but a girl I... cared about more than I had planned to.
I quickly put that aside: I had to, before it softened me into uselessness.
“There will be a series of boring appointments,” I said, letting the promise be what it was—structure, safety. “Questions. Paperwork. Waiting.”
Her mouth trembled less.
“Okay.”
The word came out in a whisper. And in that whisper I heard everything she hadn’t said in words:
I’m tired of being afraid.
I’m tired of feeling it creep in—and not being able to stop it.
If there’s a way forward that doesn’t make me sick… I choose it.
“We start tomorrow.”
Charli nodded. In that nod I saw her again—the Charli who could let structure hold her; the structure she’d been craving, the structure she’d tried to mimic with a bottle and a secret.
The apartment settled into a hush that reminded me of Wardrobe after hours: still, intentional, waiting.
And with a clarity that made my thoughts go almost cold, I understood: whatever she’d done to keep her happiness safe inside her own body—whatever private answer she’d found—had fused itself to her sense of self. Taking it away wasn’t just taking a pill. It was pulling away the scaffolding she’d built to stand upright.
So we’d have to give her something real in its place. Something supervised. Something that didn’t depend on fear.
And we’d have to do it gently enough that she stayed whole.
😌💛