The heat of the radiated floors warmed her from the bottom up. Harper stood barefoot in the kitchen, a cut of uncooked chicken breast on the butcher block. Her little food scale sat beside it. Just the look of the sickly, pale flesh made her nauseated. She hoped for a revulsion so thick it would make her vomit. That would be nice, no cut-up knuckles for once. Of course, it never came.

Harper held her breath as she put the chicken breast in a Ziploc bag and weighed it. One hundred grams. She’d have to cut off a small piece to get it down to an even 150 calories.

She grimaced as she snipped off a piece of the meat and reweighed. Harper didn’t know if it was the pregnancy or the eating disorder that made this so difficult. It’s not like you haven’t had chicken breast before. White meat, relatively low calories, and all protein with no carbs. After shellfish, it was one of the best choices she could make.

“What am I doing?” she whispered aloud to the empty kitchen. She still didn’t know what she’d do about the baby. Why get attached to something that might not even survive? Her body was so fucked up, so malnourished, it wasn’t exactly the ideal environment for new life.

It wasn’t a surprise that so many celebrities had trouble conceiving. Why even young models opted for IVF or, better yet, surrogates. At 900 calories a day, she shouldn’t even be able to sustain herself long-term—yet alone someone else.

It would be better to just get rid of it now, she told herself. What was it, the size of a peanut, if that? She could get over an abortion at this point. But at the second trimester? The third? A miscarriage at that point might do her in. Even though she was aware of the life within her, without any bumps or kicks, she could still play pretend.

“You busy?” Sean popped his head into the kitchen. He glanced briefly at the chicken breast in her hand. “I want to show you something. I mean, if you’ll let me.”

“No, what is it?” she asked, eager for an excuse to walk away from the chicken. She ran her hands under hot water and scrubbed briefly before she followed him.

“This way,” he said over his shoulder.

She was uncertain as she followed him into his bedroom. Now? This is how we’re going to restart things?

“Oh my god!” she gasped. “What is this?”

She didn’t know when he’d done it, but the entire bedroom was lined in white butcher paper from floor to ceiling. The windows were covered and sunlight pushed through the paper. Every strip had a drawing of a person on it—and they were all her, each done in incredible detail. She’d forgotten how talented he was, how he took to human skin as canvas with a needle in his hand. About the stunning mural in his old, small apartment.

Harper went from drawing to drawing, each perfectly to scale. In some incarnations, she was dressed in one of the couture pieces she’d borrowed from her old housemate Molly. In others she was folded in a seated position, wearing her favorite wornout sweats. He’d depicted her both in full-blown glam makeup, and barefaced with a sloppy ponytail.

“I don’t understand,” she said. Harper shook her head as she traced the outline of one of her copies. He’d used various mediums from charcoal to acrylic paint and watercolors. Some of the pieces were still mildly damp.

She looked to him, but he just shrugged. There was no expression on his face. “I just want you to see yourself how I see you.”

“This … these are beautiful,” she said.

“Exactly.” She tried not to let him see how she compared herself to her standing figure. Was her waist really that small? It couldn’t be. In the drawings, they seemed exaggerated, almost a caricature of an hourglass body. This can’t be right. But as she sidled up close to it, she had to admit that the dimensions lined up.

“My calculations are perfect,” Sean said.

She blushed, thankful that her back was to him. Even if he did get the measurements right, and it seemed he had, it was easy to gloss over flaws. Simple to exaggerate the few good qualities she had. How could someone really see me like this?

Harper continued along the wall until the images changed. Suddenly, Joon-ki stared back at her, his almond-shaped eyes warm and deep. “It looks just like him,” she said.

“That’s kind of the point.”

“No, it’s more than the details. You captured his essence in this.” The creation was so lifelike, so spot on, she couldn’t fathom how he could do it all from memory. There were elements of Joon-ki she would have never remembered herself until she saw them. How he had that tiny freckle below his right eye, nearly obscured by the black lashes.

“Who’s this?” she asked, and her nose wrinkled when she came to a vaguely familiar figure. Then she saw the raven nestled in flowers on the figure’s neck. “Is this supposed to be you?” She looked at him with curiosity.

“It is me,” he said.

“No … this barely looks like you,” she said. “I thought artists were supposed to be good at self-portraits.” She walked along a series of so-called Sean images. But they were all wrong, off somehow. Most were far shorter than he was, and some were close to ugly. The eyes were too wide apart, the hairline too low, the royal nose squat and flat as a mushroom. “Is this how you see yourself?” she asked.

He gave her a curt nod.

She felt her heart crack and crumble into pieces. I know how that feels, she thought, but she couldn’t get the words out. Instead, she circled back to the first images, the ones of her. The woman who stood before her was simultaneously familiar and a stranger. It was like one of those exaggerated caricatures you could get of yourself along the Seine in Paris. The artists only dared to highlight your ugly features if they thought you could handle it. For the most part, they picked the elements you might like about yourself and blew them up. Was that what he’d done to her?

But, no. She could see it wasn’t a caricature. The woman who was represented before her was easily a real person. “Is this really how you see me?” she asked softly.

“Yes, but it’s not just how I see you,” he said. “It’s how you really are. You have no idea how beautiful you are, do you?”

Tears threatened to spill down her cheeks. She wanted to tell him she both knew it and didn’t. Obviously, there was something about her or she wouldn’t have had such a successful career. She knew her height, the broad shoulders and unbelievably small waist were built not just for modeling, but for being a supermodel. She’d never fit in with the runway waifs who weighed eighty pounds without even trying. Once, a director had told her she should have been working during the heyday of the 1990s supermodels. Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, that’s who she was built like. But she’d started her career when heroin chic was in hot demand. And that was a skeletal ideal she could never fully attain. “Thank you for showing me,” she told him. It was the most she could get out.

She turned to leave, but paused at the door. Her hand rested lightly on the thick wood trim painted a steely gray. Harper turned her head. “Do you know how to cook chicken?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said, surprised.

“I … I have some. And some vegetables, but I think I can just steam those in the microwave. If … if you’re not busy, and you don’t mind cooking—”

“Sure,” he said. She sensed the eagerness below the surface, but for once she didn’t care. She was in control. Everything she had for dinner had been hand-selected by her, so there wouldn’t be any surprises. She could, she was allowed, to eat it all.

Besides, pregnant women are supposed to have more calories, she thought. There was some comfort in knowing the baby would gobble up the excess. However, more comforting was the idea that she was nourishing another living thing. A baby that was half her, half Sean.

She led them into the kitchen and gestured helplessly at the glob of pinkish meat on the counter.

“What are you doing to this poor thing?” Sean asked as he examined the cut-up breast and little sliver of discovered excess calories.

“I don’t know,” she said. There was no way she’d admit she had to weigh it all.

He shook his head in wonder and pulled out the remaining cuts of meat from the Styrofoam packaging. Sean rinsed the meat and put a pot over medium heat. She almost cried out when he drizzled some olive oil into the pan, but held it together. Olive oil had so many calories, and she didn’t have a clue how much he’d used.

He glanced up at her. “Olive oil is good for you,” he said.

“How come?”

“Good fats,” he said. She hated that word. “Antioxidants, anti-inflammatory properties. It’s supposed to help with preventing strokes, heart disease—”

“You make it sound like I’m eighty years old.”

He shrugged. “If you waited until you’re eighty to start taking care of your body, you probably wouldn’t be in a very good position.” Sean started to chop up a head of cauliflower.

“Maybe you’re right.” She picked at one of the pieces of cauliflower and chewed on the white blandness mindlessly.

“You might want something on that,” Sean said. He smiled at her kindly. “Here, I’ll show you.”