Chapter 10: Corrupted Inheritance
The days after her breakdown were a fragile, new ecosystem. Vanja moved through them with a hesitant grace, like someone testing the strength of healed bones. She held Leo. She would sit in the grey nursery for an hour, his small weight a burning star in the crook of her arm, studying the minute movements of his face—a twitch, a dream-suck, the incomprehensible, serene focus of his slate-blue eyes. She didn’t speak to him. She observed. But her observation had lost its clinical edge. It was just looking.
Sydney watched this tentative integration with a guarded hope. It was real, but it felt thin, stretched over the yawning void of what Vanja had been. The raw, weeping creature on the rug had been packed away again, but the box was no longer sealed.
“My mother wants to see the baby,” Sydney said one morning over breakfast. She was leaning against the kitchen island, her robe hanging open as she pumped milk, the mechanical wheeze-click of the pump a strange counter-rhythm to the Mozart playing softly from the ceiling speakers. “She’s been… persistent.”
Vanja, scrolling through a neurology journal on her tablet, didn’t look up. “The esteemed Mrs. Sweeney. The pillar of country club propriety.” Her tone was flat, but a familiar, dark filament of amusement threaded through it. “Does she know the pillar’s daughter is a lesbian who was impregnated by her girlfriend’s magical cock?”
“Vanja.”
“She knows about you. She doesn’t know the… mechanics.” Sydney shifted, the bottles half-full of bluish milk. “She just knows I’m with a woman, and we have a son. That’s enough of a heart attack for one decade. Seeing you might finish the job.”
“And you want to subject her to that?” Vanja finally looked up, her golden-green eyes catching the light. The old spark was there, but it was colder, more calculating. A return to a familiar weapon.
“I want her to see her grandson.” Sydney’s voice was tired. “I want to go home for a weekend. Show him off. Let her bake her awful sugar cookies and pretend everything is normal. It would be… easy.”
“Easy.” Vanja repeated the word as if tasting a foreign spice. She set the tablet down. “Take him. Go. Have your easy weekend.”
Sydney stopped the pump. “You wouldn’t come?”
“A conservative midwestern matriarch, a sterile McMansion, and chatter about lawn fertilization? My presence would be a detonator in a room full of hydrogen. You want easy. Go.” Vanja’s smile was thin, practiced. “I have a stack of journals this high. I’ll enjoy the silence.”
The dismissal was too smooth. It was the old Vanja, building a wall. Sydney felt a twist of unease, but also a longing for the simple, sun-drenched boredom of her childhood home. For a version of her mother who existed before the scandal of her daughter’s life. “Just two nights.”
“Take three.”
---
The penthouse air changed when Sydney left. The silence wasn’t peaceful; it was accusatory. The faint, sweet scent of baby powder and milk that had woven itself into the fabric of the place began to fade, replaced by the sterile jasmine and marble chill Vanja had always preferred. She stood in the center of the living room, listening to the hum of the city. She felt the pull of her study, the orderly lines of text, the clean logic of synaptic pathways.
Instead, she walked to the bar and poured three fingers of amber whiskey. She drank it standing at the window, the liquor burning a path through the hollow feeling. The vulnerability she’d shown Sydney was a open nerve. It needed cauterizing. Not with pain, but with dominance. With the reassertion of a simpler, more brutal truth.
Her phone buzzed on the marble counter. A text from Sydney: Made it. Mom’s already crying. Dad’s confused. Leo’s a hit. Miss you.
Vanja didn’t reply. She finished the whiskey.
Another buzz, an hour later. This time, a call. Sydney’s name flashed. Vanja let it ring, watching the screen until it went dark. It lit up again immediately. Something cold settled in her gut. She answered.
“Vanja.” Sydney’s voice was strained, trying to be quiet. “Hey.”
“Is he ill?”
“What? No. No, he’s fine. He’s perfect. It’s… God, it’s my mother. She saw your picture on my phone. The one from that gala. She went quiet. Then she started asking a thousand questions. Where you’re from, what your family is like. I gave her the magazine version. But she’s… she’s insisting.”
“Insisting on what, Sydney?” Vanja’s voice was dangerously soft.
“On meeting you. She says if you’re important enough to be the other parent of her grandchild, she needs to look you in the eye. She’s making it a thing. A principled stand. She’s getting in the car.”
Vanja’s pulse, which had been a sluggish tide, gave a single, hard thump. “She’s coming here.”
“She says she’s ‘driving into the city to clear the air.’ Dad’s trying to stop her. She won’t listen. She’ll be there in an hour. I’m so sorry. I can tell her to turn around—”
“No.” The word cut through Sydney’s panic. “Let her come.”
“Vanja, don’t. Please. She’s a handful at the best of times, and she’s wound up tight about this—”
“I’ll receive her.” Vanja’s lips curved into a smile the phone couldn’t see. “We’ll clear the air. Consider it handled.”
She ended the call and poured another whiskey. The hollow feeling was gone, replaced by a sharp, anticipatory focus. A project. A subject. Helen Sweeney. Conservative. Judgmental. A woman who defined herself by her husband’s success, her daughter’s acceptable presentation, and the pristine, fragile shell of her own life.
Vanja knew how to deal with shells. She knew the precise pressure required to crack them.
---
Helen Sweeney looked both exactly like her photos and nothing like them. She was fifty, but preserved with the fierce, expensive diligence of her caste. Slim in a tasteful taupe sheath dress and a double strand of pearls. Her blonde hair was a perfect, helmet-like bob. Her face was handsome, with Sydney’s sharp cheekbones but none of the soft uncertainty. It was a face of schedules and social committees. But her eyes, as Vanja let her into the penthouse, were a turbulent, shocked blue. She was trying to absorb the scale of the wealth around her, the audacious art, the dizzying view, while clinging to her moral high ground.
“Mrs. Sweeney,” Vanja said, her voice a warm, polished instrument. “Welcome. Sydney didn’t give me much notice.”
“I don’t imagine she did.” Helen’s gaze swept over Vanja, taking in the simple, devastating cut of her cream silk trousers and shirt. Vanja had dressed down, which only made her look more unattainably elegant. “This is quite a place.”
“It’s home.” Vanja gestured to the living area. “Can I offer you a drink? You’ve had a long drive.”
“Water is fine.” Helen perched on the edge of a sofa, back straight, her purse clasped on her lap like a shield.
Vanja brought her a glass of chilled mineral water in a crystal tumbler. She sat opposite, crossing her legs, a study in relaxed power. “Sydney tells me you have concerns.”
Helen took a small sip. “I have questions. My daughter has made… unconventional choices. I’ve accepted them. But this situation… a child. It’s permanent. I need to understand the person who is now permanently tied to my family.”
“Ask your questions.” Vanja smiled.
And Helen did. They were the expected probes: family background (invented, old European money, conveniently deceased), education (impressive, recited with bored ease), intentions (“To love your daughter and raise our son. What else?”). Vanja parried each one with effortless, vaguely disdainful charm. She could see Helen’s frustration growing. The woman hadn’t found a chink. She hadn’t found the loose thread in the tapestry she could pull.
“And what is it you do, Vanja?” Helen finally asked, her tone sharper. “Aside from… this?” She gestured vaguely at the opulent room.
“I study the mind,” Vanja said, her gaze locking onto Helen’s. “I’m particularly interested in repression. The stories people build to hide their core desires from themselves. The lives they construct as monuments to what they think they should be, while secretly hungering for what they’ve been told is forbidden.”
Helen’s face tightened. “That sounds very… theoretical.”
“It’s visceral.” Vanja stood up, fluid. “It’s about the scent of fear underneath perfume. The tremor in a steady hand. The way a pulse jumps in a throat above a pearl necklace.” She took a step closer. “You drove an hour and a half fueled by righteous indignation. But that’s not what’s vibrating in you right now, is it, Helen?”
“Mrs. Sweeney,” she corrected automatically, but her voice lacked force.
“Helen.” Vanja said it like a command. “You looked at my picture and you didn’t see a threat to your daughter. You saw a threat to yourself. You saw something you couldn’t categorize. Something that wouldn’t care about your church league or your garden club. It terrified you. And it excited you.”
“How dare you.” Helen stood, her composure cracking. “You know nothing about me.”
“I know you married a man who provided a stage. You’ve been playing a role ever since. The devoted wife. The gracious hostess. The disappointed mother.” Vanja was in front of her now, close enough for Helen to smell the whiskey and her subtle, expensive scent. “I know the performance has left you empty. I know you look at your daughter, covered in my marks, full of my child, and you feel a jealousy so sharp you mistake it for outrage.”
Helen’s hand rose, a half-aborted gesture to slap her. Vanja caught her wrist, not hard, but with an unbreakable firmness. Her skin was cool. “Don’t.” The word wasn’t a plea. It was a diagnosis.
Helen trembled. The fight drained out of her, replaced by a stunned, breathless confusion. Vanja saw it. The shell was cracked. Now to pry it open.
“Come with me,” Vanja murmured, her thumb stroking the frantic pulse in Helen’s wrist.
She led her, unresisting, down the hallway, not to the bedroom, but to the master ensuite bathroom. It was a temple of white marble and gold, sunlit and steamy from the tub Vanja had drawn earlier in some unconscious premonition. The air was thick with the scent of vanilla and jasmine. Vanja guided Helen to the vast vanity, her own reflection—flawless, controlled—framed beside Helen’s startled, crumbling one in the mirror.
“Look at you,” Vanja whispered, standing behind her, her lips close to Helen’s ear. “Still pretty. So carefully maintained. All for a man who looks at you like another piece of his portfolio.” Her hands came to rest on Helen’s shoulders. She felt the tension there, a rock-hard bundle of nerves. “You wanted to look me in the eye? Look.”
Helen’s eyes, wide and lost, met Vanja’s in the mirror.
Vanja’s hands slid down, over the taupe fabric covering her arms, then around to the front. Her fingers found the zipper at the back of Helen’s dress. She pulled it down slowly. The sound was loud in the humid room.
“What are you doing?” Helen’s question was a breathless thread of sound.
“Clearing the air.” Vanja pushed the dress from Helen’s shoulders. It pooled at her feet, revealing a lace-trimmed slip, sheer stockings, and a practiced, disciplined body. She was slimmer than Sydney, her waist cinched, her skin pale and barely lined. Her breasts, held in cream lace, were full and high—a surgeon’s perfect, unnatural artistry.
Vanja hummed appreciatively. Her hands circled Helen’s waist, then rose to cup those perfect, fake breasts over the lace. She squeezed. “A tribute to an ideal. Do they feel anything?”
Helen gasped, her head falling back against Vanja’s shoulder. “Stop…”
Vanja pinched a nipple through the lace, hard. Helen jolted, a sharp cry escaping her. It wasn’t a sound of pain. “Liar,” Vanja breathed into her ear. She slipped her hands under the slip, dragging it up until she could peel the lace cups down. The breasts sprang free, implausibly round and firm, the nipples a dusty pink. Vanja palmed them, rolling the nipples between her thumbs and forefingers. “They’re just silicone and nerve endings. But these…” She pinched again, harder. “These feel everything, don’t they?”
Helen was panting now, her eyes screwed shut, her hands braced on the cold marble vanity. Vanja pushed the slip up to her waist, exposing a matching lace thong. She hooked her fingers in the sides and peeled it down Helen’s thighs. Helen stepped out of it clumsily.
Vanja turned her around, pressing her back against the vanity’s edge. The marble was cold on her bare skin. She was exposed, her body a curated artifact being appraised by merciless green eyes.
“You came here to shame me,” Vanja said, kneeling before her. “To put me in my place. And now you’re standing in your stockings and pearls, waiting for me to eat your cunt.”
Helen whimpered.
Vanja didn’t touch her with her hands. She simply leaned forward and buried her face between Helen’s spread legs. Helen was already wet, a slick, hot betraying humidity. Vanja’s tongue was relentless. She licked broad, flat strokes, then focused on her clit, sucking the stiffening bud into her mouth, flicking it with her tongue-tip. Helen’s hips jerked. A string of muttered, fragmented pleas fell from her lips—“God… oh, no… please… don’t stop…”
Vanja drove her to the edge with brutal efficiency. She felt Helen’s thighs begin to clamp around her head, her body tensing. Then she pulled away, leaving her shaking on the precipice.
Helen cried out in frustrated agony.
Vanja stood, her mouth glistening. She unfastened her own trousers, letting them fall. The low hum filled the steamy air, a vibration Helen felt in her bones before she understood it. Her eyes, glazed with need, dropped down. She saw the manifestation, the thick, flushed length of Vanja’s cock growing from her perfect body. Helen’s mouth fell open. A strangled sound, part horror, part blinding arousal, escaped her.
“This is what fathered your grandson,” Vanja said, her voice rough. She gripped herself, giving a slow, deliberate stroke. “This is what your daughter begs for. This is what’s inside her, filling her, making her scream. Do you want to understand now, Helen?”
Helen couldn’t speak. She just nodded, a desperate, humiliated bob of her head.
Vanja took her by the hips and spun her around, bending her forward over the vanity. Helen’s cheek pressed against the cool mirror, her reflected face a mask of shattered propriety. Her pearls clattered against the marble sink. Vanja kicked her legs wider apart.
She rubbed the broad, slick head of her cock through Helen’s wet folds, gathering moisture, teasing her entrance. “You’re tighter than she is,” Vanja observed clinically. “Unused. A pristine, neglected channel.”
Then she pushed in.
Helen shrieked. It was a raw, tearing sound of profound violation. Vanja was thick, and Helen was unprepared, both physically and spiritually. Vanja seated herself to the hilt in one relentless thrust, burying herself in the clenching, searing heat. She held there, letting Helen feel the full, impossible stretch.
“Oh, fuck,” Vanja groaned, the feeling of this new, forbidden conquest electric. “Fuck, you’re tight. Like a fucking virgin.”
She began to move. Short, sharp strokes at first, punching the air from Helen’s lungs. Each thrust rocked Helen’s body, making her pearls skitter and tap against the sink. Vanja wrapped a hand in her perfect blonde hair, yanking her head back so she had to see her own reflection—eyes wild, mouth slack, being fucked senseless by her daughter’s lover.
“Look at you,” Vanja grunted, her rhythm deepening, lengthening. “Look at the pillar of the community. Taking her daughter’s girlfriend’s fucking cock like a cheap whore. You love it. Don’t you?”
Helen couldn’t deny it. Her body was betraying her with violent, pulsing contractions. “Yes…” she sobbed, tears streaming down her reflection’s face. “Yes, god, yes…”
“Whose is it?” Vanja demanded, slamming into her, the sound of skin on skin echoing off the marble.
“Yours!”
“Say my name.”
“Vanja’s! It’s Vanja’s cock!” Helen screamed.
Vanja fucked her with a punishing, focused intensity. This wasn’t about pleasure, though the sensation was white-hot and consuming. It was about erasure. About rewriting a story. She was overwriting Helen’s moral authority, her maternal concern, her entire identity, with the brutal, physical truth of this act. Each deep drive was a nail in the coffin of the woman Helen Sweeney had presented herself to be.
Helen came with a guttural, shattered cry, her body convulsing around Vanja’s thrusting cock, her fingers scrambling for purchase on the slick marble. The force of it tipped her over the edge into a place of complete, mindless surrender.
Vanja felt the muscles milking her, and with a final, brutal snarl, she buried herself as deep as she could and came in her.
The hot pulse of Vanja’s release inside her felt like a brand. Helen shuddered, her body absorbing the shockwave, every muscle loose and trembling. Vanja stayed buried within her, her own breathing harsh against the shell of Helen’s ear. The only sounds were their ragged breaths and the distant hum of the city far below.
Vanja pulled out slowly.
The sensation of emptiness was immediate and profound. Helen gasped, her legs buckling. She would have collapsed if the marble vanity hadn’t been holding her up. A trickle of warmth seeped down her inner thigh. She stared at the evidence in the mirror—her smeared lipstick, her ruined hair, the vacant shock in her own blue eyes. Vanja straightened her own clothes with casual, efficient movements, as if she’d just completed a transaction.
“Clean yourself up,” Vanja said, her voice devoid of the earlier heat. It was a command. She turned and walked out of the bathroom, leaving Helen exposed and dripping against the cold stone.
Helen moved on autopilot. She used a monogrammed hand towel, soft as cashmere, to wipe between her legs. The white fabric came away stained. She stared at it. She should have felt shame. Revulsion. Instead, a bizarre, possessive thrill shot through her. She folded the towel neatly, tucking it into her purse. A souvenir. A proof.
She dressed mechanically, her fingers fumbling with the zipper. The silk of her slip felt foreign against her sensitized skin. Every movement echoed the memory of Vanja’s hands. She fixed her hair in the mirror, smoothed her dress. The face that looked back was the same handsome, composed mask. But behind the eyes, everything had been scorched clean.
Vanja was in the living room, standing at the window with a fresh glass of whiskey. She didn’t turn around. “Your driver is waiting downstairs. I took the liberty of calling him.”
Helen didn’t move. Her body was here, but her mind was stuck in the bathroom, bent over, being split open. “That’s it?” Her voice sounded thin, reedy.
“What else is there?” Vanja finally glanced over her shoulder, one eyebrow arched. “The air is clear. You’ve looked me in the eye. You understand the situation.”
This was dismissal. It was colder than the fuck itself. Helen’s chest tightened. “I don’t understand anything.”
“You understand enough.” Vanja turned fully now, leaning against the glass. “You understand that everything you built your life on is a performance. You understand what you really are. That’s a gift, Helen. Most people go to their graves never knowing.”
Helen took a step forward. “What am I?”
Vanja smiled, a fleeting, cruel twist of her lips. “Mine. For an hour, you were mine. Now go back to your husband. Tend to your azaleas. Play bridge.”
The words were arrows, each one finding its mark. The life she was returning to felt like a cardboard set. Flat and painted. The memory of Vanja inside her was the only thing that felt real, brutally three-dimensional. She didn’t speak again. She walked to the elevator, her spine straight, the stolen towel a secret weight in her bag.
The drive home was a blur of highway lights. She didn’t call Sydney. She sat in the back of the Lincoln, her thighs pressed together, feeling a phantom ache. She replayed every second. The exact pressure of Vanja’s grip on her hair. The obscene, wet sound of their joining. The look in Vanja’s eyes in the mirror—absolute ownership.
Her husband, Robert, was in his study, watching golf. “How did it go?” he asked, not looking up from the screen.
“It was enlightening,” Helen said, her voice perfectly steady. She went upstairs, ran a scalding bath, and soaked until her skin pruned. She did not wash herself inside. She kept the feeling.
Two days later, Sydney returned with Leo, flushed and tired from the visit. Helen hugged her grandson, cooed at him, asked all the right questions. But her eyes kept scanning the room behind Sydney, desperately hoping for a glimpse of dark blond hair.
“Vanja was sorry she missed you,” Sydney said, unpacking diapers.
“Was she?” Helen’s heart hammered against her ribs.
“Yeah, she’s buried in work. You know how she gets.”
Helen did know. She knew the focus in those green eyes. She knew the strength in those hands. A pathetic, hungry void opened inside her. She needed a fix. A confirmation.
A week later, she found a pretext. A charity gala in the city, one she’d normally avoid. She told Robert she was going with an old college friend. She bought a new dress, black and tighter than anything she owned. She had her hair done. She looked in the mirror and saw a stranger wearing her skin, a stranger vibrating with desperate intention.
She didn’t call. She went straight to the penthouse, her pulse a frantic drum in her throat. The doorman, recognizing her from before, let her up.
Vanja opened the door. She was in sweatpants and a tight tank top, her hair in a messy knot. She looked bored. “Helen. To what do I owe this… surprise?”
“I was in the city.” The lie was transparent.
“You’re shaking.” Vanja observed, not moving from the doorway.
“I need to talk to you.”
“We talked.”
“Not about… not about what happened.”
Vanja studied her for a long, silent moment. Helen felt dissected. Finally, Vanja sighed, a sound of mild inconvenience, and stepped back. “Five minutes.”
The moment the door closed, Helen was on her. She didn’t plan it. Her body moved of its own volition. She kissed Vanja, clumsy and frantic, her hands grabbing at the soft cotton of the tank top. Vanja stood perfectly still, allowing the assault, not responding. Helen’s tongue pushed into her mouth, tasting whiskey and indifference.
Vanja broke the kiss by gripping Helen’s jaw, not hard, but with definitive pressure. “This is pathetic.”
“Please.” The word was a broken thing. “I can’t stop thinking about it. I dream about it. I touch myself in my marital bed and pretend it’s you.”
“I don’t care.” Vanja’s thumb stroked her cheekbone, a mocking mimicry of tenderness. “You were a diversion. A lesson. The lesson is over.”
“It’s not over for me!” Helen’s composure shattered. Tears spilled over. “You ruined me. You showed me what I am and now I have to go back and pretend I’m not! I can’t do it. I need you to do it again. I need you to fuck me so I can remember.”
Vanja’s eyes glinted. This was a new data point. Obsession. It was a more potent drug than fear. She let go of Helen’s face. “On your knees.”
Helen dropped instantly, the expensive fabric of her dress pooling on the polished floor. She looked up, her makeup already streaking. Vanja didn’t manifest her cock. She just looked down at her, a queen regarding a supplicant.
“Open your mouth.”
Helen obeyed, her lips parting. Vanja hooked her thumbs into the waistband of her sweatpants and underwear, pushing them down just enough. She wasn’t hard. Helen stared at the soft, fascinating flesh, the potential. “Make me want to fuck you,” Vanja said, her voice cool.
Helen leaned forward without hesitation. She took Vanja into her mouth, her tongue swirling around the softness, sucking gently, trying to coax it to life. She worshipped it with a slavish devotion, her hands gripping Vanja’s thighs. She tasted clean skin and salt. She worked with a frantic, focused energy, humming, using every technique she half-remembered from decades ago, fueled by pure need.
Vanja watched her, one hand resting idly on the back of Helen’s head. She let her continue for minutes, her own arousal a slow, reluctant coil tightening in her gut. This was power in its purest form: this beautiful, broken woman, a mother, a wife, a social artifact, on her knees, desperate to please.
When Vanja was fully hard, Helen moaned around her, the vibration a testament to her triumph. Vanja curled her fingers in Helen’s perfectly styled hair. “You really are a hungry little thing, aren’t you?” She began to move Helen’s head, setting a slow, deep rhythm. “This is all you are now. A mouth. A warm, willing hole. This is your purpose.”
Helen’s eyes streamed tears of gratitude. She took Vanja deeper, gagging slightly, embracing the discomfort as part of the sacrament. Vanja fucked her mouth with a steady, possessive pace, watching herself disappear between Helen’s red lips. She came with a low grunt, her release hitting the back of Helen’s throat. Helen swallowed convulsively, licking her clean afterward with a whimper.
Vanja pulled her up by the hair. “You want to be fucked?”
“Yes. God, yes.”
“Then fuck yourself.” Vanja shoved her towards the grand piano. “Bend over it. Use your fingers. Show me how much you need it.”
Helen stumbled to the piano, the glossy black lid cool under her palms. She hiked her dress up around her waist. She was bare underneath. She hadn’t worn underwear. She reached back and pushed two fingers inside herself, gasping at the contact. She was drenched. She fucked herself with her own hand, frantically, staring back at Vanja over her shoulder.
“Say it,” Vanja commanded, leaning against the wall, arms crossed.
“I’m a whore!” Helen cried, scissoring her fingers.
“For who?”
“For you! I’m your whore! Please, Vanja, I need your cock, I need it inside, please don’t make me do this alone—”
Vanja pushed off the wall. The hum filled the room. She was on her in three strides. She slapped Helen’s hand away and drove into her soaking cunt in one brutal thrust. Helen screamed, her back arching, her fingers scrambling for purchase on the piano lid, hitting a discordant cluster of keys.
Vanja set a punishing, mechanical rhythm. This wasn’t about mutual pleasure. It was about exorcism. About using Helen’s obsessive need to purge the last lingering echoes of her own vulnerability. Each snap of her hips was a nail driving the old Vanja—the one who wept—deeper into the past.
“This is all you get,” Vanja snarled, pounding into her. “You don’t get to call. You don’t get to visit. You wait until I want to use you. You are a toy I put back in the box. Do you understand?”
“Yes! Yes, I understand!”
“You are nothing.”
“I am nothing!”
Vanja came again, a hot, angry flood, and Helen followed, her climax a violent seizure that made her teeth rattle. She slumped over the piano, sobbing, spent.
Vanja withdrew. She pulled her clothes back on. “The doorman will get you a cab.”
Helen pushed herself upright, her legs jelly. She smoothed her dress down. Her face was a wreck of smeared mascara and utter devotion. “When?” she whispered.
Vanja walked to the door and opened it. The finality was absolute. “When I’m bored.”
Helen walked out, her body humming, her soul utterly owned. The obsession was complete. It was a loop playing behind her eyes every moment: the mirror, the marble, the piano, the look on Vanja’s face. It was the only script that mattered now. She would wait. However long it took. She was in the box. Waiting for the lid to open.