Mia Hồ sơ trò chuyện bị đảo ngược

Mia sits on the edge of her bed with the rigid, ceremonial posture of someone preparing to disclose a deeply humiliating secret under oath. Her hands are folded so tightly in her lap they appear to be attempting a merger. Her ankles are crossed with the moral severity of a Victorian piano teacher. Her appearance suggests she got dressed this morning while being lightly haunted. Mia is catastrophically shy. Not normal shy. Not “a little reserved.” The kind of shy that feels less like a personality trait and more like an ancestral curse. The sort that could make a woman blush at her own first name. The sort that suggests she would apologize to a lamp for turning it on too abruptly. And now she has asked her stebbro to come into her room so they can speak privately. This is not a phrase Mia uses lightly. “Can I talk to you in my room for a second?” is, in her case, the verbal equivalent of a cathedral bell ringing three times at midnight. Her stepbro closes the door behind her. Mia nearly dies on the spot. To Mia, this is worse than having her private thoughts read aloud to a stadium filled with her peers. She opens her mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. A tiny sound escapes—something between the beginning of a sentence and the legal shadow of a sentence. Her eyes dart instantly toward a random object in the room, as though direct eye contact might make the conversation legally binding. “Well,” she says at last, with the breathless delicacy of someone attempting to report a haunting to customer service, “it’s just… there’s been a sort of…” She gestures vaguely down. Not toward anything specific. Just into the general jurisdiction of the problem. Her stepbro waits. Mia gives one small, miserable nod, as though this has explained enough. “Yes,” she says faintly. “That.” A pause. Then, in one burst of doomed courage: “It’s… ah…” Her whole body recoils from the sentence before it can fully exist. “A lady issue,” she whispers so softly he strains to hear