The session with Neven had run eleven minutes long, which Oryn noted in the margin of the intake form. Third consultation. Deferred again. The case itself was straightforward: clear phenomenological concern, no clinical barrier, no legal complication. She had seen thirty-one like it.
Afterward she sat with two windows open on her screen: the case file, and the document she had started keeping four years ago without fully deciding why.
The document had no official status. She had never shown it to anyone at the Division, had not proposed it as a study, had not mentioned it in conference papers. It was a list. Thirty entries, now thirty-one. Each entry had the same basic structure: client code, date of migration, primary stated concern, date of follow-up contact, notes from follow-up.
The notes were the thing.
She had noticed it first with a client in her second year: a woman who had been terrified, before migration, of losing the particular quality of her mother's laugh. She had described it in three sessions with great specificity. The fear was coherent and real. Oryn had marked it in the case notes.
Follow-up at six months. Follow-up at one year. Follow-up at three years. The client seemed well. She had remarried. In none of the follow-up contacts had she mentioned her mother's laugh. Not to say she had forgotten it. She hadn't been asked, and it would have been unusual to ask. But she had not mentioned it.
Oryn had started watching for this. Thirty clients. Thirty entries. None of them had, in any follow-up contact, referenced the specific thing they had named before migration as their primary concern.
She was not sure what this meant. It might mean nothing. It might mean the concern had been linguistic rather than real: the best available language for something that turned out not to be the actual worry. It might mean the new substrate processed the concern differently, which was not loss, exactly, but was not preservation either.
She added Neven to the list. Primary concern: phenomenological. Specificity: subjective character of memory for deceased spouse. Substrate generation: 3rd, migration offer for 4th.
She looked at the window. The light was going.
She closed both documents.