The first woman who finds her is named Constance, and she arrives the way all things arrive in Liv's life now — not by accident.
She emails on a Tuesday. The address is the one Liv put on the website she built in August, which she described to herself as a professional necessity and to Vashara as a test, and which she described to no one at all as what it actually is: a door. The website says: grief integration coaching, by appointment, sliding scale. It does not say anything about what Liv actually does in those appointments. Some information is better delivered in person.
Constance is forty-one. She lost her husband eleven months ago to a cardiac event that nobody saw coming, including the cardiologist who had given him a clean bill of health six weeks before. She has two children and a good support system and a therapist she sees on Thursdays and none of it touches the thing at the center of her, which she describes in the email as a room I can't get out of. Liv reads this phrase three times.
She knows that room.
Six months ago she was still living in it — or the beginning of the end of it, the last stages of the fourteen months that started the night Daniel died and ended, in a manner of speaking, in Celestine's strip mall on Hollywood Boulevard. She was forty minutes late to the reading because she sat in the parking lot and couldn't decide whether to go in. She is glad she went in. She is glad every day that she went in, in the specific way of someone who knows exactly what the alternative was.
What she does in those appointments:
She sits across from a woman via video call, with the candles she asks each client to light on their end, and the seven minutes of silence, and the preliminary attunement that she has refined across two dozen clients into something that moves as smoothly as a practiced gesture. She tells the truth in full, unspooled, with no softening. The entity, the pact, the six days, the harvest, what is taken and what is kept. She says all of it and she watches each woman's face on the screen and she can read, now, within the first thirty seconds of the truth-telling, whether a woman is going to say yes.
The face is not the indicator. It is the stillness. A woman who is going to say yes goes very still when she hears the truth — not frozen, not frightened, but the particular stillness of someone who has been waiting for a thing to be named and has just heard it named. She recognizes it because it is what she did in Celestine's chair.
She schedules Constance for a video call, which is how she does the intake. On video she can see everything she needs to see: the quality of the grief, the shape of the ready, the particular frequency of a woman who has run out of the other options. On video she can also do the preliminary work — the attunement, the first thread of connection between the client and whatever entity is available and appropriate — without either of them knowing it's happening.
She tells clients the video call is to make sure they're a good fit for the work. This is true, as far as it goes.
What she does not tell them is that Vashara will be listening from the inside, and that Veleth, from wherever Veleth is, will be listening to Vashara.
After the call with Constance she sits in her apartment and drinks a glass of water and thinks about Celestine's strip mall. The gold letters: READINGS — PAST LIVES — SPIRITUAL CLEANSING. The flaked corner of the C. The card in the plastic sleeve: WALK-INS WELCOME.
You're thinking about her, Vashara says.
"I'm thinking about the sign," Liv says. "The hand-painted gold letters. Whether she repainted them often or just let them fade."
Does it matter?
"It matters to me what kind of person she was. Whether she took care of things."
She took care of you, Vashara says. She told you everything, which is the most caring thing she could have done.
Liv puts the glass down. On the wall: the amber paintings, eight of them now, the underworld rendered in warm tones and hung with no particular order because the order is internal, not external. She painted the first one three months ago, in the same sitting where she built the website — two acts of making that were really one act of deciding what she was. On the wrong side of the sink: a mug she uses daily without ceremony. In her chest: Vashara, seven hundred years old, warm and permanent and present, attending to the evening the way she attends to everything — with patience, with interest, with the long view.
Six months since the pact. She is fluent now. The underworld is not a foreign country; it is the country next to the one she lives in, accessible through a door she can find at will, warm and amber and vast, full of things that are interested in her in ways she has learned to read. Veleth watches. The entities move. The chain extends.
She thinks about Constance and her room she can't get out of.
She opens her laptop. She writes an email.
The email says: I think I can help you. Before our next session there are some things I need to share with you that are outside the usual framework of grief coaching. I'm going to ask you to trust me a little further than feels comfortable. I'll tell you everything — all of it, with no softening — and you can decide.
She reads it back. Changes nothing.
She sends it.
This is how Six Months begins.