Her fourteenth period since she and Adrian had started trying. It wasn’t a surprise. She’d been feeling it coming for days. But still, the disappointment registered like a mule-kick to Maya’s soul. Red, raging disappointment followed by a single heartbeat of relief. With each passing day her life lost more focus, her feelings became more oblique, her whole reason for being became cloudier and cloudier. She had somehow arranged to see her weird friend Sara tonight. She’d been trying to get out of it for so long that she’d used up all her excuses. And in a funny way, given the murkiness of her current state of being, it would be quite nice to see someone from her ‘before’ days, someone who’d known her when she was normal. So she was meeting her in Soho for drinks (Sara didn’t eat, or at least, if she did, it was something she did in the privacy of her own home). Maya had come home from work first and now had exactly eighteen minutes before she needed to leave again, enough time to discover her period had started and to check her email and find the latest missive from her charming friend.
