Loen had been doing lunar sleep recalibration for eight years, which meant she had not been doing it for three of the eleven since the moon left. She had come to it late, after her second career and before what she suspected was her last one. The profession had not existed before the moon went. It had emerged out of a need that had not yet been named, and Loen had helped name it.
What she had noticed, over eight years: forty-one of her clients woke in the same twenty-minute window, somewhere between 2:50 and 3:10 in the morning. Not all of them, not even most of them, but enough that she had started keeping a separate record. She had looked up what the moon had been doing in that interval before it left. The answer was: nothing distinguishable. No particular phase, no particular position. The body was not remembering a specific event. It was remembering a regularity, something that had been reliable long enough that the sleep architecture had organized itself around the gap. She had started to think the word insomnia was not quite right for it. The body was not failing to sleep. It was keeping an appointment.
Sola was forty-eight and had been waking at 3:04 AM for two years before she came to Loen. She had tried the standard interventions. Light therapy, temperature adjustment, the sleep compression protocols. She had reduced caffeine and increased exercise and maintained consistent wake times. None of it had addressed the 3:04 window. She arrived at Loen's office with two years of documented failed corrections and the particular exhaustion of someone who had been doing everything right.
They sat across from each other in the low light Loen preferred for intake sessions. Loen read through the records. She asked Sola what happened when she woke. Sola said she lay still for a while, then checked the time, then lay still again. Sometimes she went back to sleep by 3:30. Sometimes she didn't.
Loen said she thought it might not be insomnia.
Sola looked at her. "What is it, then?"
"The body keeping an appointment, " Loen said. "Something that was on the schedule for a long time and hasn't been cancelled."
Sola was quiet for a moment. Then she said: "Can you fix it?"
Loen had been asked this forty-one times. She had a practiced answer. "The question, " she said, "is whether you want to."
After Sola left, Loen sat for a while in the office. She did not have another client until eleven. She thought about what she would write in Sola's file: the usual observations, the history of failed interventions, the twenty-minute window and the two-year duration. What she would not write: that she had been running her own sleep log in the background for six months. That she woke at 3:06. That she had not brought it to anyone.
Out the window the night sky was very clear, and the place where the moon had been was stars from edge to edge.