The light was the first thing that found her, and it found her wrong — flat and white and too high, the kind of light that had no temperature in it, that showed the dust on the boards and the scuff where the cot leg had dragged and nothing else. Maya's mouth tasted like the inside of a copper pot. Her head was an anvil with a heartbeat in it.

She got one eye open and the room assembled itself in pieces: the fan turning slow and indifferent above, the chair under the window with its paint worn to the bare wood, the empty glass on its side by the cot's leg, a crescent of amber dried in the bottom of it. Her heels were still on. She could feel the strap across the back of her heel, the little buckle dug into her skin.

Her mother was at the window.

Sunita stood with her back half to the room, one hand in the pocket of a long camel coat, the other holding a fresh glass. The whiskey in it caught the northern light and held it, amber and sharp, and she turned the glass a quarter turn without drinking from it, watching the light move through the liquid like she was checking a measurement.

"You're awake," she said, without turning around.

Maya pushed herself up onto one elbow. The cot creaked. Everything below her ribs shifted and settled in a way that made her stop and breathe through her nose for a second. Her hair was in her face, a heavy black curtain of it, and she pushed it back with the flat of her hand and felt the tangles catch on her rings.

"Mama." Her voice came out like a hinge that needed oil. She tried again. "How is the day."

Sunita turned then, and crossed the floor, and the heels made their sound on the boards — that particular sound, the one Maya had known since she was a child, the sound of her mother's approach, unmistakable from any other woman in any other room. She sat on the edge of the cot, and the mattress dipped and rolled Maya gently toward her.

And Maya — who had not cried last night, who had held it in the whole way down into the whiskey and the dark, who had promised herself she was past it — Maya put her face into her mother's shoulder and cried.

It came up out of her without permission. Big, ugly, wet. Her shoulders shook and her breath caught in pieces and she got her arms around her mother's waist and held on like the cot was a boat. The camel coat smelled of wool and cigarettes and that perfume, and under it, faint, the studio smell that never came out of anything.

"Mama," she said into the coat. "It's painful."

"I know."

"It's still — it still hurts. It's not — I thought it would stop. It's here." She took her hand off her mother's waist and pressed it flat against her own sternum, below her breasts, where the ache sat like a swallowed stone. "Here. It doesn't stop."

Sunita didn't shush her. That was the thing about her mother — she never shushed. She let the crying run its course the way you let weather run. Her hand came up and settled on the back of Maya's head, and her fingers started moving through the hair, slow, working out the tangles one at a time, and the pull of it on Maya's scalp was the first good thing that had happened to her all day.

"Look at me," Sunita said, when the crying had gone quiet.

Maya lifted her face. Her eyes were swollen, her nose was running, and she could feel the salt tracks drying on her cheeks in the cold air. Her mother looked at all of it — the wreck of her, the smeared liner, the ring in her nose, the hoop earrings still in from yesterday, one of them bent slightly where she'd slept on it — and didn't flinch.

Sunita cupped her face in both hands. Her palms were warm. Her thumbs rested in the wet tracks under Maya's eyes, and she wiped them once, outward, the way you'd fix a child's face before school.

"You want to know how the day is," Sunita said. "The day is the day. It's not going to be kind to you because you cried, and it's not going to be cruel to you because you didn't. It doesn't care." Her thumbs moved again, slow. "But you want to know something, and I'm going to tell you, because there's no one else in the world who's going to say it straight to your face."

"Mama—"

"You wanted this life."

Maya's mouth closed.

"Not me." Sunita said it evenly, no heat in it, which was worse than heat. "You came to me at fourteen with your hands shaking and you told me what you wanted. I didn't put it in you. I only didn't stop you. There's a difference, and you know the difference, and I'm not going to pretend there isn't."

The fan turned. Somewhere below them in the building, a door opened and shut, and a man's voice said something to someone, and it didn't matter, and it stopped mattering.

"It hurts," Sunita said, "because it's supposed to hurt. That's the price. You want to be a woman? Then this is what a woman is, sometimes, and no one hands you the bill at the end, they hand it to you every morning. You wanted the body. You got the body. You wanted the life that goes with it. This is the life that goes with it." She let go of Maya's face and sat back. "Accept it. You're my brave girl. You always were."

Maya looked down at her own hands in her lap. The nails were lacquered a deep oxblood red, and she could see the chip on the middle finger, the one she'd caught on the robe's tie two nights ago, and she hadn't fixed it. Her hands were trembling. They'd been trembling since she woke up, a fine shallow tremor like something left running.

"You wanted to be a pornstar," Sunita said, softer now. "And now you are one."

She reached past Maya and picked up her phone from the chair where she'd set it, and she unlocked it with her own thumb — Maya saw the motion, the practiced ease of it, and didn't say anything — and turned the screen toward her daughter.

The video was there. The thumbnail was the two men and the red light on the wall, and the little number under it had a comma in it and the comma had moved since yesterday. Under that, a smaller number, moving, the view count ticking up while they sat there looking at it, one view at a time, some man somewhere in the dark pressing play on Maya's body.

"Millions," Sunita said. "You hear me? Millions of people have watched you. That's not nothing. That's not a thing you can take back, and you shouldn't want to. That's a fortune." She set the phone face-down on the chair. "You know what I made in my first two years? You know what this house cost? This week — this one week — is more than both. The number has a comma in it, Maya. A comma."

Maya watched the phone go face-down and thought about the feed catching her voice, the way it had snagged on the name and cut out, like the room itself had lost interest in what she was called.

"I don't know if I can do it again," she said.

"You can."

"Mama—"

"You can, because you're going to." Sunita stood up and smoothed the coat down over her hips, and the movement was the same movement Maya had watched a thousand times, the one that said the conversation was over whether you agreed or not. "Get some rest. Tomorrow there's another shoot. A new one. You'll sleep, you'll wake up, and it'll be a different day, and you'll do it, and you'll be fine. That's how it works. That's the whole trick."

She walked to the corner of the studio where a low table sat against the wall — the one with the ring-stained wood and the dead plant in the chipped pot — and there was a bottle there, and a clean glass. She poured. Not a shot, not a splash. A large peg, the glass more than half full, amber and sharp in the white light, and she brought it back and held it out.

Maya looked at it.

"I don't—"

"Drink it."

She took the glass. The cold of it went into her palm and up her wrist. She turned it a quarter turn the way her mother had, watching the light move through the whiskey, and then she put the rim to her mouth and drank. It burned the whole way down and settled into the ache below her ribs and sat there with it, and the two of them — the burn and the ache — were not friends, but they were at least in the same room.

"Good girl," Sunita said. She sat back down on the edge of the cot, and her hand went back into Maya's hair, and she started again, slow, working the tangles out, and Maya closed her eyes and let her head be moved where the hand wanted it.

She drank again. The second swallow was easier than the first. Her shoulders came down off her ears. The trembling in her hands slowed and then mostly stopped, and she noticed it stopping the way you notice a sound you'd stopped hearing — the shhh of the fan, the traffic three floors down, her own breath going in and out of her like it belonged to somebody who wasn't in trouble.

"Mama," she said, into the glass.

"Mmm."

"Are you staying."

"I'm here."

Maya finished it. The last of it went down warm and easy and she set the glass on the floor by the cot's leg, or she meant to set it there, and it went down the last inch too fast and landed on its side and rolled a half turn on the boards and stopped. Neither of them picked it up. The light lay in the curve of it, a thin amber crescent, and the dust came down through the white air above the floorboards without hurry.

Her mother's fingers were still moving in her hair. Maya lay back down on the cot and the mattress took her. The ceiling was there above her, the fan turning, the slow complaint of it, and the smell of the room — turpentine and whiskey and her mother's perfume — sat over her like a hand, and she could not tell them apart anymore, and she stopped trying to.

The last thing she felt was the weight of the hand in her hair, and the light on her face, and then the light went soft at the edges and the fan kept turning and she was gone.