The “something” inside the women

The “something” inside the women is an active presence that Nutmeg feels beneath a client’s skin and tries to quiet through her fitting work. Neither an ordinary illness nor something she can remove, it moves, changes, and returns after treatment. Its growing force sets the terms of Nutmeg’s vocation: she can give women a brief respite, but cannot promise a cure, and the effort eventually wears her down.

First Encounter and Discovery

Nutmeg first feels the “something” while helping a department-store owner’s wife, a former opera singer who had recognized and supported Nutmeg’s talent before she became a famous designer. The two are waiting for the woman’s daughter to be fitted for wedding clothes when the mother abruptly presses her hands to her head and sinks unsteadily to the floor. Nutmeg catches her and reflexively strokes her right temple. Beneath her palm she feels something as definite as an object inside a cloth bag.

In response, Nutmeg closes her eyes and recalls the empty zoo in Hsin-ching, where she had been allowed to wander alone as the chief veterinarian’s daughter. The memory brings back a world of protection and reassurance: autumn light, high clear skies, clouds, and flocks of Manchurian birds moving among the trees. As she remains within that remembered place, the woman gradually stands again. Her headache seems to have passed, though she is still disoriented; some days later, she pays Nutmeg far more than Nutmeg expected. The episode joins the presence to a method Nutmeg has not yet understood: contact with it coincides with an inward journey into memory.

A Living Presence and a Practice

About a month later, the woman asks Nutmeg to place her hand on the same temple again. Nutmeg feels the presence and concentrates on its shape, but it twists and changes. She recognizes that it is alive. Closing her eyes, she returns to the scenes of the Hsin-ching zoo she had previously described to Cinnamon. Her consciousness wanders between memory and story before she returns to herself. The woman thanks her, but neither asks for nor offers an explanation of what occurred. Nutmeg feels mildly tired, with a film of sweat on her forehead, and refuses a second payment: the first had already been more than enough, she says, and this is not her job.

That refusal does not end the work. The woman soon introduces Nutmeg to another client, a small woman in her mid-forties with sunken eyes, exceptionally fine clothes, and only a silver wedding band as an accessory. Her referrer urges Nutmeg not to refuse and tells her to accept payment, insisting the work will matter to both of them. In a private room, Nutmeg finds a different presence in this client: stronger and faster-moving than the first. She holds her breath, closes her eyes, and pursues her memories more intensely, burrowing into their smallest folds and sending their warmth toward it. What begins as an unexpected response to one woman’s distress has become Nutmeg’s work.

What the Fitting Can—and Cannot—Do

The presence does not disappear when Nutmeg treats it. She feels its movements with her hands, but cannot fully understand what it is or how her intervention works. At most, the fitting reduces its activity for a while. Within a few days—usually three to ten—it begins again, advancing and retreating over short intervals while unmistakably growing larger over time. Nutmeg experiences that increase as something like cancer cells spreading, and the presences seem to tell her that she is wasting her time and that they will ultimately win. Her care can delay them, not defeat them.

That limit defines both the value and the unease of the work. The clients receive a few days of peace, not a lasting cure, and the temporary calm is followed by renewed movement. Nutmeg’s effort is real, but it does not grant mastery over what she touches. The presence is not merely a passive object awaiting repair: it changes shape under her attention, resists being quieted, and returns on its own course. The fitting is therefore an encounter with an agency that Nutmeg can affect without controlling.

Nutmeg’s Questions and the Cost of Care

As she continues working, Nutmeg wonders whether the presences belong only to the women who come to her, whether all women carry one, and whether she herself has one. She also notices that her clients are middle-aged women. Yet she does not truly want answers. The work has accumulated around her until she feels confined to the fitting room by other people’s need. She is nearing fifty, while Cinnamon has turned twenty; the clients change, but the practice does not. Three clients are lost over more than seven years—a death in an automobile accident, a “permanent expulsion” for a minor infraction, and a departure connected with a husband’s work—and four women with aliases and expensive clothes take their places.

The routine brings no progress and no retreat, only the gradual aging of everyone involved. Nutmeg increasingly feels powerless, as if she were becoming an empty shell and disappearing into darkness. She tells Cinnamon she has little strength left and fears burning out completely, but cannot bring herself to abandon clients who need her. Her gift thus binds care to exhaustion: the fact that she can provide temporary relief makes it harder for her to leave, even though she knows the presence will return.

A Presence That Moves Between People

When Nutmeg confides in Cinnamon, her silent son listens and nods. Speaking to him gives her an unusual measure of peace: she does not feel entirely alone or powerless. She sees an inversion in their roles. Although she treats other people, Cinnamon seems to treat her simply by listening; she wonders whether he absorbs pain and loneliness like a black hole. Once, she places a hand on his forehead as she would during a fitting, hoping to search within him, but feels nothing. The presence is therefore not confirmed as something universal or something that Nutmeg can locate in everyone. Its scope remains uncertain, even as it shapes her questions about what women carry and what her son may silently receive.

The phenomenon also binds the fitted women’s private distress to Nutmeg’s own remembered past. Her earliest recollection of the Hsin-ching zoo becomes the inward landscape she revisits during treatment, and the warmth of memory is what she directs toward the changing presence. The work depends not on a diagnosis or a declared cure, but on the passage between bodily contact and recollection. That passage offers relief without explanation, and it leaves the central mystery intact: Nutmeg can feel the presence, meet its movement, and briefly slow it, but cannot say what it is or make it go away.