Chapter 2: The Profile
The profile took her forty minutes, and she was ashamed of how much she enjoyed it.
It turned out that she was good at this. Not at the mysticism, obviously, but at the shape of it, the careful architecture of confidence. She had spent nine years persuading executives that a bar chart was telling the truth. How different could a séance be?
**Dani O., Spiritual Consultant.**
*Holistic cleansing. Energy diagnostics. Compassionate boundary-setting with the unseen.*
She took the photo from a stock site: a woman with silver-streaked braids, a velvet scarf and a wise, faintly amused expression, who looked as though she had talked a great many people out of a great many ghosts. Dani cropped it, brightened it, and stared at it for a long moment.
"You," she told the woman, "are going to carry me."
Her fingers hovered over the field marked *Bio.* She wrote, *Dani has been sensing the unseen since childhood,* which was untrue, and then added, *especially in older buildings,* which was at least a little bit true, because her landlord's building was old and she had been sensing damp in it for years.
The reviews came next. TaskNest required at least three before a profile could go live, and she had no clients, which was the whole difficulty, so she did what any analyst would do. She built a small dataset.
*"Dani cleared my basement in under an hour. I cannot recommend her enough!"* said Marguerite T.
*"Skeptical at first, but the temperature in my nursery has been normal ever since."* said Colin R.
*"Professional, kind, and slightly terrifying in the best way."* said a man she named Hollis, because she liked the sound of it.
She read them over once. The guilt arrived on schedule, a thin cold feeling at the back of the throat.
"It's not fraud," she said aloud. "It's *projected testimonials.*"
*Tick,* said the hallway.
She did not look up. She had decided, some weeks ago, that the building simply made noises, and that deciding this was cheaper than a plumber.
She set the rate to $75, because a hundred and forty seemed to invite scrutiny, and clicked **PUBLISH.** The little yellow bird on the screen flapped its wings and shot a confetti burst across her kitchen table.
It was, she had to admit, extremely convincing. It had a calm, warm, authoritative tone, a tidy list of services, and a small badge at the top that read **ID VERIFIED.**
Truyện liên quan
She yawned. She stood. She stretched until something cracked. It was past one in the morning and tomorrow, in a matter of hours, there was a quarterly review in which a man called Gareth would explain to the team how to "lean into synergy."
Her phone buzzed against the wood.
She stared at it.
*New request! Ruth K. needs a spiritual consultant. 2.4 miles away. Estimated payout: $225.*
It had been, she calculated, ten minutes.
"That's not possible," Dani said, out loud, to the empty room. "Nobody's seen it. I haven't even, there's no *way.*"
The phone buzzed again.
*Message from Ruth K.: Please, is anyone there? It's happening again. I can't sleep. I have a little girl. I don't know who else to call.*
The kitchen was very still. The refrigerator, as if it too wished to listen, stopped humming. Dani stood in the middle of her tiny apartment in her socks, with a phone in her hand and fifty-four thousand dollars of reasons in the other, and felt something slide in her chest, like a chair being pushed back from a table.
A frightened woman and a little girl, at one in the morning.
She was not a person who believed in things. But she was a person who answered emails.
She typed, with thumbs that were not quite steady: *Hello Ruth. This is Dani. I can be there tomorrow evening at 6. Please try to rest.*
Three dots. Then: *Thank you. Thank you so much. God bless you.*
Dani put the phone down. She turned off the light. In the dark kitchen, the old fridge hummed again, as if it had been holding its breath, and from the hallway, very softly, there came a sound that was almost, though she would never have admitted it, a chuckle.
"Hello?" said Dani.
Nothing.
"Great," she muttered, and went to bed. "I'm hearing things. That's *fantastic.* That's going to be a very good first impression."
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