The client returned her calm at the end of Tuesday's session. Vord felt it arrive, the familiar texture, slightly compressed, the way a garment comes back from the cleaners with the shape just barely different from how you sent it. She catalogued the delta. It was small. It was also the forty-third loan she had made this year, and the deltas accumulated.
She had taken up the work at thirty-four, when a senior practitioner had identified the capacity in her and offered to train her. The work had seemed, at the time, like a natural extension of what she had always done, her friends had always borrowed her steadiness in crisis, her parents had borrowed her patience when they aged into need. The practice formalized what was already happening and, she had thought, would make it more manageable. It had, for a long time. The practice gave her protocols for how much to lend, how often, what to keep in reserve.
What the protocols had not anticipated was the long-term drift. Emotions, when borrowed, went through the borrower's interior and came back having touched what was in there. The calm she had lent to a man going through a divorce came back tinged with something she could only describe as a resolved sadness, not her sadness, his, absorbed into the texture of the calm and not fully removed when he returned it. Over time, the accumulated tinge of other people's interiors had changed the quality of her reserve. Her baseline calm was not where it had been at thirty-four. It was functional, but different. Less wide.
She tried, after the client left, to locate a particular grief she kept in reserve, not for loans, for herself. A loss from two years ago, not one she had lent. She could find the shape of it now, the outline. She couldn't find the full weight. She had not been able to since she had lent out what felt like adjacent grief to a client who needed ballast for a difficult decision, and it had come back smaller than it left.
She sat in the office and looked at her hands on her desk. The work was still good work. The protocols were still sound. She had helped people get through things they could not have managed with their own emotional resources. The logic was unchanged. It was only that she had not understood, at thirty-four, that she was also one of the resources being managed.