The sign in the window says MADAME CELESTINE — READINGS — PAST LIVES — SPIRITUAL CLEANSING in hand-painted gold letters that someone touched up maybe five years ago and not since. One corner of the C has flaked away. Below it, a smaller card in a plastic sleeve: WALK-INS WELCOME.

Liv sits in her car across the street for eleven minutes before she gets out.

She has been here twice before. Both times she told herself it was grief doing the driving — grief and the particular 2 a.m. desperation that makes a woman from Silver Lake end up in a strip mall between a check-cashing place and a phone case kiosk on Hollywood Boulevard, paying forty dollars for someone to hold her hands and tell her Daniel was at peace. She didn't believe it either time. She came back anyway, the way you keep pressing a bruise to confirm it still hurts.

This time is different. She can feel it before she even opens the car door. Something in the air pressure, something that adjusts around her like a room making space. She stands on the sidewalk for a moment and breathes in exhaust fumes and a thread of incense from inside the shop, and the combination is not unpleasant, and she finds that strange.

Inside: dim light, the smell of incense thick enough to chew, a small oscillating fan working overtime against the August heat. Red velvet curtains the color of an old wound. Shelves of candles in glass jars, a row of crystals that catch the light and throw small rainbows onto the wall. Madame Celestine sits behind a draped table wearing a kaftan the color of bruised plums, silver locs piled high and pinned with something gold, reading glasses on a beaded chain she never actually uses for reading. She has more rings than fingers and hands like a woman who has held a thousand secrets and learned not to flinch at them.

She looks at Liv the way you look at something you have been expecting.

"You came back," she says. Not a greeting. An observation, the way you'd note that it was raining.

"I didn't sleep again." Liv takes the chair across from her without being invited. "Three nights. I keep reaching for my phone to text him. I keep — " She stops. Presses the back of her hand to her mouth. She is not going to cry in this strip mall on Hollywood Boulevard. She has made that rule for herself. "I just need to talk to him. Once. That's all I'm asking. Just once."

"I know what you need." Celestine's hands come flat onto the table. Rings catching the candlelight. "I know why you're here this time. Not the same reason as the other times."

Liv goes still.

"There's another way," Celestine says. "I've never offered it to you before. I'm offering it now because you've come back three times in two months and you have the look of a woman who has run clean out of the other options." She pauses. Her eyes are very dark and very calm. "You have the look of a woman who would agree to anything."

"What look is that?"

"Like you've already said yes to something you haven't heard yet." Celestine tilts her head. "Have you?"

Fourteen months. Fourteen months since a Tuesday became the last day of the life she'd built since she was twenty-six. Fourteen months of one side of the bed staying cold no matter how she rearranged herself. Daniel's coffee mug on the wrong side of the sink because she can't move it and she can't use it and she can't throw it away. The last thing she said to him that morning: you always put it on the wrong side. Not I love you. Not drive safe. Not — anything that would have mattered.

"Tell me," Liv says.

Celestine tells her. She doesn't soften a word of it. The pact, the price, the mechanics, the entity and its name and what it requires. What it takes from each man it moves through. What it leaves in the host when it's done. The six days, and what happens inside them. The channel that opens at the end, and what Liv can do with it if she still wants to.

She tells Liv everything. This is what makes her trustworthy.

Liv listens to all of it. She asks three questions. They are not the questions Celestine expects, which is how Celestine knows she is serious.

"And at the end," Liv says. "I get to talk to him."

"You get the opportunity. Whether you take it —" Celestine pauses, "— is up to you."

Liv frowns. "That's a strange way to phrase it."

Celestine looks at her for a long moment. Her eyes have watched a great many things. They do not look away.

"Yes," she says. "It is."