She finds out on a Thursday.

Seven days after the pact closed. Seven days after she drove to Celestine's strip mall at 1 a.m. and sat across the street with the engine off and the door open and the candles burning behind the red velvet curtain. Seven days after she drove away without going in. She knows what that decision means — she made it with her eyes open.

What she doesn't know, on that Thursday morning, is that Vashara never left.

She notices it in the shower. Not a sound, not a message, not the specific warmth she had grown so accustomed to over the course of six days that she'd started mapping it the way you map a room you'll be leaving soon — cataloguing the particular quality of the heat, the texture of the presence, the shape of the warmth at the base of her spine, in her chest, behind her sternum. She'd been preparing to miss all of it. She'd told herself she would miss it. She'd been right, because she does miss it, which is exactly why it takes her a moment to realize that what she's missing is still there.

It is quieter than it was. Much quieter. During the six days it was a current — warm, constant, impossible to ignore. What she feels now is more like the memory of warmth than the warmth itself. An ember in a banked fire rather than the fire. She has to go still and actually look for it to find it, and when she does, it is faint and deep and absolutely present.

She stands in the shower with her palms flat against the tile and goes very, very still.

Good morning, says a voice she thought she'd never hear again.

Liv presses her forehead against the cool tile. She has a complicated feeling that she does not immediately attempt to name. "You didn't leave."

No.

"The pact closed. You took what you were owed. You said—"

I said the pact would close. A warmth moves through her, unhurried. I didn't say I would leave.

"That was implied."

By whom?

She doesn't answer. She stands in the shower for a while.

The complicated feeling sorts itself slowly, the way feelings do when you stop trying to manage them. Underneath the surprise and the residue of grief and the particular anxiety of discovering you are not alone in yourself: something else. Something warm and stubborn and embarrassingly uncomplicated.

She is glad.

I know, Vashara says, without smugness. Just as a fact. I felt it the moment you came back from the strip mall without going in. You chose this. You didn't know that's what you were choosing, but I did.

"How long?" Liv asks.

As long as we want. A pause. I have no schedule. I've never had a schedule. I've simply had hosts who ran out of time or ran out of will. You don't seem to be running out of either.

Liv turns off the shower. Gets out. Stands in front of the mirror.

The woman looking back at her is the same woman who stood in this mirror seven days ago — same body, same face, same hands — but the way she looks at herself is different. Something in the eyes. The angle of the chin. The particular way she is taking up the space in the room, without apology, without the reflexive contraction that had been her default for as long as she could remember and especially for the fourteen months after Daniel.

"Rules," she says.

I don't do rules.

"Guidelines. Terms. Whatever."

Tell me what you need, Vashara says. The warmth in her chest is patient and genuinely curious. I'm listening.

Liv looks at herself in the mirror for a long time. Then she picks up her toothbrush.

"We do this together," she says finally. "Not you driving and me watching. Together."

The warmth moves through her slowly, settling into its new shape, the longer-term configuration of something that intends to stay.

Together, Vashara agrees.

That is how Six Weeks begins.