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I open the door. She’s waiting in the hall in a charcoal suit that fits so sharply it probably has its own legal representation. Her pale hair is twisted into a low knot. Her lipstick is the color of a warning label. Her tablet is tucked against her chest.

She looks at me once. Quickly. Professionally.

Still, I feel the scan. Hair. Face. Body. Stomach. Shoes.

Especially the stomach.

My jaw tightens before I can stop it.

Petra doesn’t like me.

She has never said this, obviously. Petra would never be so rude as to have a visible human emotion. But I know.

“Ms. Hanes,” she says.

“Ms. Lindqvist.”

“Was everything completed?”

“Yes. I have officially been stabbed for the final time.”

Her expression doesn’t change.

Fine. No stabbing jokes. Duly noted for the minutes.

“The nurse confirmed?”

“Unless she was lying to both of us for sport, yes.”

Another pause. Petra blinks once. Slowly.

I should stop talking. I know this the way I know caffeine is not a food group, and yet here we all are.

She opens the slim leather folder tucked beneath her tablet and removes an envelope. Cream paper. Thick. Tasteful. Even the envelopes in Alester Chandler’s life have generational wealth. “As outlined in the agreement, your per-injection disbursement.”

I take it. My stab stipend.

No. That sounds too dignified. My poke allowance.

I look down at the envelope and almost laugh.

“What?” Petra asks.

“Nothing.”

I should let it go. I really should. But the money is in my hand, my stomach hurts, my ovaries feel like overachieving grapes, and Petra has been looking at me for weeks like I’m a typo in a legal document. So I say, “I was just mentally calling it my poke allowance.”

Silence. It stretches.

It grows legs. It moves into the hallway and starts paying rent.

Petra looks at me. I look at Petra.

Somewhere behind a closed door, a printer starts making aggressive little noises.

“That is not the terminology used in the agreement,” she says.

“No, I figured.”