She stood at the window a long time before she heard the door. The northern light came in flat and white and laid itself across the scuffed floorboards, and the room still smelled of cold dust and old turpentine, and somewhere below in the building a fan turned over and over, the same slow complaint it had been making since she arrived. She had not slept. She had sat down on the cot once, and stood back up, and paced the length of the room twice, and found her way back to the window, and the light had gone from gray to white and the fan had not stopped. Her dress was still stiff where it had dried. She had not taken off her heels.

The door opened without a knock. Sunita came in with the flat morning behind her and closed it with her back, and she looked at Maya the way she looked at a room she was about to rearrange — once, all the way through, deciding where everything went. Her hair was down. She wore a black wrap coat over what Maya knew was her nightgown, and heels, because Sunita did not own a pair of shoes that could not be heard coming.

"Mama," Maya said.

That was all of it. The word came out of her the way the rest of it had come out of her on the feed — unplanned, unshaped, out of the body before the mind could get in front of it — and then she was across the room and her face was against her mother's collarbone and the wool of the coat was scratchy on her cheek and she was crying, hard, the ugly kind, the kind that pulled her mouth sideways and made her shoulders jerk. Her bangles knocked together against Sunita's arm. Her nose ring pressed into the wool and the ring went cold and stayed cold.

Sunita did not say anything at first. She put one hand flat between Maya's shoulder blades and the other into her hair, at the crown, and she held, and she let it come. Her blouse under the coat was silk — Maya could feel it through the open front, cool and smooth, and her tears went into it and darkened it and Sunita did not move her away from it or lift the fabric off her skin.

"It hurts," Maya said into her mother's chest. "Mama, it hurts."

"I know."

"Not — " she couldn't get the sentence arranged. She tried again. "My legs. And inside. And it hurts in a place I can't point to. I don't know where it is."

Sunita's hand moved down the length of her hair, slow, from the crown to the ends at her hips, and started again at the crown. Maya's hair was tangled from the mattress and from the car and from the two hours of not sleeping on the cot, and her mother worked the knots out with her fingers without looking at them. One at a time. The way she used to when Maya was small and it was Sunday and there was nowhere to be.

"It is painful," Sunita said. Her voice was low and it came from under Maya's ear, through the ribs, more felt than heard. "Yes. It is painful. And it is still pain."

Maya's fingers closed on the lapel of the coat and held on.

"It is the price to be a woman," Sunita said. "Not the price of the shoot. The price. Your whole life, this is the price. You wanted the body, you got the body. Nobody tells you the body comes with a bill. I am telling you now." Her hand stopped at the nape of Maya's neck and stayed there, thumb on the tendon, pressing the way she pressed when she was about to say the thing she had come to say. "And you decided this life. Not me. You came to me at fourteen and you told me what you were. I did not tell you what you were. You told me."

"I know."

"Look at me."

Maya lifted her face off the silk. Her mascara had run down both cheeks and she could feel it, the two wet tracks going tacky in the air, and she did not wipe them. Sunita looked at her for a moment and then took Maya's face in both hands — palms on her jaw, the way you hold something you are about to inspect — and her eyes were hazel and steady and there was nothing soft in them at all, which was how Maya knew the softness was still in there somewhere, holding still, being kept out of the way on purpose.

"This is your fortune," Sunita said. "Not a punishment. A fortune. Do you understand the difference? A punishment you survive. A fortune you spend." She let go of Maya's jaw and smoothed the hair back off her wet cheek with the edge of her thumb. "My brave girl. You wanted to be a pornstar. Now you are one. Nobody hands you the thing you asked for and then apologizes for it."

Maya laughed. It came out wrong, wet and short, more like a cough, but it was a laugh, and it surprised her, and her mother's mouth moved at one corner in a way that was almost nothing.

"Come here," Sunita said. "Sit."

She steered her by the shoulders to the cot. The mattress gave under Maya with a sound like a breath let out, the thin ticking sliding over the frame, and she sat with her heels still on, her knees together, her hands in her lap. Sunita crossed to the table under the dead lights — the table where Marco had sat typing while the car came, the table with the ring on the floor around it, the cable taped down, the monitor turned off and gray — and she opened her bag on it and took out a bottle. Amber. The label had been turned away from Maya. There was one clean glass on the table and Sunita turned it over in her hand, looked at it, and set it down again, and then reached past it and pulled a second glass from the shelf behind — a bigger one, thick-bottomed, the kind the crew drank out of — and poured into that one instead, a long pour, past two fingers, past three, up to where the glass began to widen.

"That's a lot," Maya said.

"Yes."

Sunita brought it over. The whiskey smelled of the turpentine in the room and the turpentine smelled of the whiskey and Maya could not tell them apart anymore, and she took the glass with both hands because it was heavy. Her nails were still lacquered and still long and one of them had a chip out of the corner that she had not noticed until now.

"Drink," Sunita said.

"I don't—"

"You drank last night. I heard about last night. Drink."

Maya drank. The first swallow went down like something being put away, and the second one hurt less, and she kept her hands around the glass and looked into it and the light from the window got into the whiskey and made a small bright coin on the surface that moved when she moved. Her mother stood over her with her arms crossed under the coat and watched her do it, and did not pour anything for herself.

"Look how much money we earn," Sunita said. "You have not asked. That is the first thing you should know. You have not asked me one time what the week has made, and it is more than I made in my first two years. More than the house. More than the car I drove you to that studio in. There is a number and it has a comma in it and it is yours."

"It's not—"

"And the video," Sunita went on, over her, the way she did when the sentence had been assembled in advance and was going to be delivered in full. "The clip. The one where you said the name."

Maya's hands went still on the glass.

"Millions," Sunita said. "Millions of viewers, Maya. Millions of people watched you and wanted you and paid for the privilege, and they are watching it again this morning while you sit here and cry on my blouse. Every hour it climbs. It has been climbing since two in the morning. Nisha sent me the numbers at four." She uncrossed her arms and laid one hand flat on the top of Maya's head, briefly, like a benediction she was embarrassed to be giving. "You are not a girl who did a thing. You are a girl the internet knows. That is not nothing. That is the thing most of them die without."

"They heard me," Maya said. Her voice had gone flat and small. "They heard me say it."

"They heard you say it," Sunita agreed. "And now it belongs to them, and you keep the rest." She took her hand back. "That is how it works. You give them the name and they give you the comma. Drink."

Maya drank. The whiskey had stopped being a thing that hurt and become a thing that was happening to her from a distance, a warmth spreading down her arms and into her fingers, loosening the grip she had kept on the glass since the door opened. She looked up at her mother and her mother's face had gone a little out of focus at the edges, the way the room had in the car last night, the way the lights had when Marco counted down.

"You get rest today," Sunita said. "That is all. You sleep, you eat something, you let it sit. Tomorrow there is a new shoot."

"Tomorrow."

"Tomorrow." Sunita took the glass out of Maya's hands — the last of the whiskey went sideways in it and did not spill — and set it on the floorboards by the leg of the cot, where the light caught it and made the little coin again, low down now, near the dust. "A role play. A bride. Indian bride, newly married, the first night. They want the shyness in it. The looking-down. The hands. It is a good one for you — you are very good at the looking-down." She said it without cruelty, the way she said most true things. "But not today. Today you sleep."

Maya lay back on the cot. The ticking slid under her and the frame took her weight and the ceiling of the studio was high and gray with the old beams and one dead light hanging off its cable, and she looked up at it and the room tilted very slowly to the left and then righted itself and then tilted again, and she closed her eyes and opened them and the ceiling had not moved but she had, somehow, a little. Her heels were still on. She could feel the straps across her arches and she did not take them off.

"Mama."

"Mm."

"Did you know it would be like that."

There was a pause. Maya heard the coat move, the wool of it, her mother shifting her weight from one heel to the other on the scuffed boards.

"I knew it would be like something," Sunita said. "It is always like something. The ones who tell you it is nothing are lying or they are dead inside and either way you should not listen to them." Another pause. "Sleep, baby. I will be here."

The glass was on the floor by the leg of the cot and Maya's fingers were hanging off the edge of the mattress above it and she could not remember letting go of it. Somewhere down in the building the fan turned over and over, the same slow complaint, and the smell of turpentine and whiskey and her mother's perfume sat in the room together and did not separate. The light on the floorboards was white and flat and it did not move.

Her hand slid off the edge of the mattress and hung there, and the room tilted one more time, and did not right itself.