Priya went to quit smoking in a strip-mall office between a nail salon and a notary, because her sister had sworn by it and the reviews said kind, no gimmicks.

The hypnotist was a small woman named Adele with a voice like warm honey poured over gravel. On the intake form, under goal, Priya had written stop smoking. Adele read it, then read Priya, then set the clipboard down.

"The cigarettes are a symptom," she said. "Most people who smoke like this are holding something in their mouth to keep from saying it." She let that sit. "Would you like to say what it is?"

"No," said Priya, to her own surprise.

Adele smiled like she'd been paid to. "Good. Then let's make it easier not to say."

The induction was boring, honestly. A candle flame, a count backward, her hands described as heavy, heavier, anchored. Priya went under expecting nothing and found herself somewhere quiet and deep, like the moment before sleep when the pillow finally wins.

"You'll find," Adele said, from very far above, "that cravings pass. And you'll find, when something wants to be said and you hold it in, that the wanting moves. It has to go somewhere."

"Where does it go?" Priya heard herself ask, from underneath.

"Wherever I tell it to," said Adele, and snapped her fingers.

Priya left forty minutes later smoke-free, light-headed, and unable to stop thinking about the shape of Adele's mouth.

She booked the follow-up for the next week. And the week after. Quitting took, as promised; she'd stand outside bars with her friends and feel nothing but clean air and a low, warm hum under her skin, like a phone set to vibrate on a windowsill in another room.

At the fourth session, Adele counted her down and asked, gently, where the wanting went when she didn't say the thing.

"It goes hot," Priya said, deep under. "Between my legs. It hums there. It's humming now."

"It's supposed to," said Adele. "It's waiting for permission. It's been waiting years. Now — when you wake, you'll find you can't lie to me. You'll find my voice in the room before I say anything. And you'll find that when I say the word honest, whatever you're holding comes loose."

She woke Priya up and asked how she was feeling.

"Honest," Priya said, and heard the word leave her mouth like a cork.

"Tell me," said Adele, "what you think about when you touch yourself."

And Priya, smoke-free, light-headed, eleven years of unsaid things banked like coal, told her. In detail. Blushing to the collarbones and utterly unable to stop, watching Adele's face the whole time to see what she'd do with it.

What Adele did was stand up, come around the chair, and put two fingers under Priya's chin.

"Be honest," she said. "Is this the thing you don't say?"

"Yes," said Priya. "Please."

"Then come here and say it with your mouth full."

What followed was slow and merciless and humming like a struck bell. Adele did not rush. She counted Priya down with her hand in her hair — ten, nine, you're safe, eight — until the words went and only the wanting stayed, moving exactly where she was told to move it. When Priya came it was with her whole body, the held thing finally let go all at once, a ten-year exhale, and she cried a little from the relief of it, and Adele held her and said the words a body needs after being opened.

"Next week," Adele said after, brushing the hair off Priya's damp forehead, "we'll work on saying what you want while awake. It's harder."

"Do I still get the other kind?"

"Every session ends with the other kind," said Adele. "That's the treatment."

Priya walked out into the strip-mall evening smoke-free and honest and humming, and the billboard on the bus stop read, in letters that seemed to breathe: you already know what you want.

She did. That was the trouble. She'd simply needed someone to say the word.