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“They tell me you’re good. That you can help me.” The girl lifts a pair of sunglasses off her face and hooks the earpiece into her collar.
Mia smiles warmly and opens her door a little wider, gesturing for her to come in. She’s pretty and composed—and she looks young, probably goes to one of the local schools here.
The girl also has the faint echoes of a bruise arcing over the curve of her cheek. Mia frowns as she shuts the door behind them and lays a gentle hand over the girl’s arm, leading her to the sitting room.
“What’s your name, sweetheart?” Mia asks.
“Patience. Patience Turner.” Patience sits on Mia’s couch and rests her hands in her lap. She’s anything but calm, though. In fact, Patience is rather fidgety, tapping her toes, bouncing her leg, fiddling with something she holds securely in the palm of her hand.
“How did you find me? I haven’t been practicing,” Mia says, settling down in on the opposite end of the couch. “No one knows what I—what I used to do.”
After Buddy, Mia left town. She’d gathered up all her belongings, threw them into a moving van—thought about changing her face, but she’d grown rather fond of it—and cleared out.
Mia had wanted a fresh start and she’d grabbed hold of one. But she’s curious now. How had Patience Turner found her? Was she a shifter too? Would Mia now have to leave behind this new life she’d cobbled together for herself, so soon after her old one had blown up?
(For a moment, Mia’s chest tightens and her palms begin to sweat, and she remembers this feeling when she was always on the run. Fleeing from Buddy. But she pushes the feeling away and offers Patience another smile.)
“My friends told me about you,” Patience says. She slips a hand into her jacket pocket and pulls out a silver brooch. Patience plays with the piece of jewelry, running her fingers over the large glittering stone. “Sam and Dean Winchester. They said you could help me.”
Mia nods and shifts closer, her wariness from earlier melting away. “Of course. What do you need?”
Patience lets the brooch rest in her lap. It’s old-fashioned, a curious choice for a young girl. She pulls out a cell phone with shaking hands and taps at the screen. “I—I never got to say goodbye to my grandmother,” she stammers, holding the phone out to Mia. “This is all I have left of her. My dad didn’t keep any old family movies or photo albums. They didn’t speak for a while. Now she’s gone and...”
Mia gently takes the phone from Patience and looks down at the screen.
A little girl—obviously Patience—is blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. Someone else leans into the frame, clapping big hands over Patience’s eyes.
“Make a wish! Make a wish, Patience!”
“I can’t see!” Patience sounds delighted, squealing, wrapping her chubby little fingers over the big hands.
“You don’t need to see to make a wish, silly.”
Mia hands the phone back to Patience and squeezes her arm, before standing up.
“I’ll just be a minute,” she tells her, before slipping out of the room.
When Mia walks back in, a few minutes later, she watches as her eyes well and her face crumples. Patience’s composure slowly leaks out of her like her tears. She presses a hand over her mouth and Mia strides over to her, curling her arms around Patience and holding her against her chest.
She sobs quietly—almost completely silent, but for her ragged, gasping breaths—into Mia’s shirt, curling the soft material in her fists.
Mia just holds onto her and starts smoothing a hand over her hair.
“It’s okay, honey,” she says, her tone gentle. “It’s okay.”
Patience tries to stifle her sobs, but they keep coming and eventually she just gives up trying to hold them back. Mia doesn’t say anything; she knows she doesn’t need to. Not this time. Sometimes her patients need her to soothe them, offer them the words and platitudes and even admonishments they didn’t hear during their loved one’s lifetime. And sometimes, they just need a shoulder to cry on, a hand to hold onto.
Mia doesn’t know what happened between Patience and her grandmother, though she has some ideas.
After Patience has cried herself out, Mia brings over a box of Kleenex and then excuses herself.
It’s never easy, absorbing her clients’ guilt and sorrow, putting on their loved one’s faces and bearing the brunt of their grief, but this one hits Mia harder than she’d expected.
When she comes back downstairs a little while later, Patience is gone but she’s left a generous wad of cash—way more money than Mia usually charges—on the coffee table.
She picks up the cash and sifts through it before pocketing it. Mia glances toward the door and sighs, rubbing a hand over her neck.
Wherever she is, wherever she’s going, Mia hopes she’s brought Patience even a sliver of comfort.