Flo lets out a nervous whinny of laughter. Lucy can see why; everything about this evening feels charged and funny—in a ha-ha and weird way. Harry’s words are the cherry on top. Maybe the cherry that will break the camel’s back. For his sake, she bites her own chuckle down. She pretty much invited the question. She doesn’t want to make him feel shit for asking it.

‘Yes,’ she tells him. Because she did used to have breasts.

Harry nods, slowly. ‘Can I ask what happened?’ He darts a glance at her then looks back to the beer in his hands.

‘Do you want the long story or the short story?’ Lucy asks.

‘Give us the short story,’ he says.

So she gives it to him.

When she finishes speaking, he finally looks her in the eye. She looks right back at him. He raises his eyebrows, lifts his beer to his lips and drains the dregs from the stubbie, holding her gaze all the while. Then, he puts the empty on the coffee table and says: ‘I’m going to stick that crayfish in the pot, grab myself another beer and, if it’s not too much trouble, I think I’d like to hear the long story.’

‘It’s not too much trouble,’ Lucy tells him. ‘It’s good for me, I think, to talk about it.’

He gets up and disappears into the kitchen. In his absence, Flo and Lucy talk quietly. After a few moments, Harry walks back into the living room with three stubbies, frosted with condensation, threaded through the fingers of one hand. He passes one to Lucy and one to Flo, then sits back down in the old chair. He props his feet on the coffee table and looks at Lucy expectantly.

‘Right,’ she says. She takes a swig of beer, and then she tells them the long story.

She tells them the long story, but she doesn’t tell them the whole story. There are some things she can’t tell Harry; there are just some things you can’t tell a man with a lovely blush you’ve only met a couple of times.

And Flo. She was such a big presence in the story; it would be weird—too intense, too intimate—to properly narrate her back to herself. Lucy can’t do it unfiltered.

And yet she wants to do it unfiltered. She wants to talk. She wants to make sense of herself to herself, and to everyone else for that matter. She doesn’t want to simply be a woman without breasts; she wants to be, well, her. She wants to be Lucy: someone who is specific and has a specific body for specific reasons.