Vin has been doing lineage work for eleven years. Most cases resolve in two or three transfer hops. Occasionally she goes back four or five. The current case goes back four and took seven weeks.
Her client, 43, came in with a right-shoulder condition that had been in her family as long as she could remember. Her mother had it. Her mother's mother had it before that. The client received it from her mother at forty, as a gift, the way some families do. She did not know where it started.
Vin traced it as standard. Client received from mother, 2021. Mother received from maternal grandmother, 1989. Grandmother received from a man she had worked with, 1974. That man was the original holder: the wound was his, from an industrial accident at a manufacturing plant in another city. He had transferred it to the grandmother when he retired, because she had been his closest colleague and had offered. The transfer was informal, unregistered, before the registry existed. Vin had to go to paper records, then to the newspaper archive, then to a request through the city health bureau that took three weeks to answer.
The original wound: a compression injury to the right shoulder, September 14, 1974, documented in the plant's incident log and a two-paragraph item in the regional daily. The man was thirty-one years old. His name is in the incident log.
The client sits across from Vin on a Thursday afternoon. Vin lays out the chain: the transfers, the dates, the names where she has them. She places the photocopy of the newspaper item and the incident log extract on the table between them.
The client looks at the documents for a long time. She does not pick them up.
After a while she says: he was thirty-one.
Vin says yes.
The client looks at the photocopy. The man's name is printed in the incident log in the standard bureaucratic font of the period. He is not otherwise notable in the historical record. He transferred his pain to a colleague who held it for fifteen years and transferred it to her daughter who held it for thirty-two years and transferred it to a woman who had it for four years before the daughter she had carried through a difficult winter gave her forty years old as a gift and said: I'll take it now.
The client slides the photocopy back across the table toward Vin. Then she pulls it back again. She folds it once and puts it in her coat pocket.
She says: thank you.
She stands up and puts her coat on. The session is over. She walks out with the shoulder, and the photocopy, and fifty years of history that was not hers until it was.