Asha's rate was twelve an hour, which put her in the middle range. She had twenty-three regular clients and held them in her mind simultaneously throughout the working day, which was not so different from holding a list: not trying to actively think about each of them, just keeping them present the way you keep a room in mind while you are in another room. They were there. That was the service.
Most clients came to her after a loss: someone who had stopped thinking of them, a parent who had died, a friend who had moved on, an ex-partner who had finally let go. The gap where the presence had been was real and measurable, and most insurance covered a short-term plan. Asha's clients tended to be medium-term: three months, six months, the bridge period while they built other sources.
She did not love the work. She was good at it. She had a high retention rate for the presence signal, measurable on the standard scale, and she had never lost a client due to performance issues, meaning her clients could always feel that she was holding them. Some practitioners let the connection lapse. She hadn't.
The difficult call came from a client named Soto. He had been with her for eight months, following the death of his sister, who had thought of him constantly and whose constant thinking had been the architecture of his daily life for fifty years. Asha had agreed to hold him at the times of day his sister had held him: early morning, after lunch, in the late afternoon while he was finishing work.
"I'm going to ask you to stop, " Soto said on the phone. "I want to try doing it without."
"Of course, " Asha said. She had the standard protocol for this.
"Is it just stopping? Or do you do something?"
"I stop holding you in mind, " Asha said. "It's like closing a door."
A pause. "And I'll feel it?"
"Yes."
He was quiet for a moment. She could hear what was in the quiet: he had been building up to this decision and was not entirely ready and he knew that not entirely ready was the only way anyone ever did anything like this.
"Okay, " he said. "Now. Let's do it now."
She let him go. There was no ceremony to it. One moment she was aware of him in the way she was aware of all twenty-three, and then she stepped back from that awareness, and he was not there. It took about two seconds.
She sat at her desk. The other twenty-two remained. Outside the window, the afternoon made its regular arguments with the light.