Time passed.

  How much? Time was meaningless. But enough for the tea to go from cold to gone. Enough for the tiny black kitten to wake up, chase its mote of light into a wall, and fall asleep again. Enough for the grey tabby to groom itself, nap, groom itself again, and fix Piper with a long, slow stare that seemed to say Well? Are you just going to sit there?

  Yes. She was just going to sit there. For a while longer.

  Grim didn’t move from her lap. Didn’t demand food or attention or acknowledge the passage of whatever time was passing. He just stayed, warm and present and purring, and Piper kept her hand on his back and breathed in and out even though she didn’t need to.

  She thought about Sarah.

  Not with grief—though there was grief in it. Not with guilt—though there was guilt, too, and probably always would be, like a scar that doesn’t hurt but never quite fades. She thought about Sarah the way you think about someone you love who is living a life you’ll never be part of. With a kind of gratitude that aches. With the quiet pride of knowing that someone you failed managed to be extraordinary anyway.

  Have a great eternity.

  She would. Piper was certain of that. Sarah would have a magnificent eternity, because Sarah had always known how to live fully—had known since she was Parker, six years old, trying on their mother’s scarves in secret, already more herself than Piper had managed to be in 847 attempts.

  And Piper would not be there to see it.

  That was okay.

  It had to be okay. And slowly, breath by unnecessary breath, it was becoming actually okay—not the kind of okay that’s just a coat of paint over devastation, but the structural kind. The kind you can build on.

  She didn’t try to follow Sarah. Didn’t send a message through the cosmic cat network. Didn’t ask Asher to arrange another meeting or pull strings or find a loophole in the afterlife’s reconciliation policies.

  The old Piper would have. The old Piper would have argued that forgiveness without reconciliation was incomplete—that if Sarah really forgave her, she’d want to rebuild the relationship, and if she didn’t want that, then the forgiveness wasn’t real, and—

  But that was the old Piper. The one who needed every equation to balance. The one who couldn’t accept a gift without calculating its worth. The one who thought love was a transaction and forgiveness was the receipt.

  This Piper understood something different.

  Sarah had the right to her boundaries. To her healing. To her story—the one where Piper was a footnote. Not even a chapter. A footnote. A brief, painful passage in the early pages of what turned out to be a spectacular book.

  And Piper’s job was not to argue with the editing.

  +2,000 points: Respecting someone else’s narrative

  * * *

  She went back to work.

  Not because she had to. Not because Tom materialized and told her break time was over or because the cosmic bureaucracy demanded it. She went back because when she sat in the nice waiting room and thought about what she wanted to do with her eternity, the answer was surprisingly clear.

  She wanted to help.

  Not to earn points. Not to climb some celestial corporate ladder. Not to redeem herself or prove to the universe or to Sarah or to anyone that she’d changed. She wanted to help because she knew, now, exactly how much damage a person could do when they chose fear over love. She’d lived it. She’d cataloged it. She’d been on both ends of it.

  And she knew how to talk about it in a way that didn’t sound like a lecture.

  She returned to Soul Processing—the real one, not the simulated version from her rehabilitation—and requested a transfer. Tom’s mustache practically did a backflip.

  “A voluntary transfer? To rehabilitation support?” He pulled out his many-handed pocket watch, possibly to check if hell had frozen over. “Miss Reilly, are you feeling quite yourself?”

  “More than ever, actually.”

  “But the pay—er, the points—rehabilitation support earns significantly less than standard processing—”

  “Tom.” Piper fixed him with a look that she’d learned from a cosmic cat. The one that said I have made my decision, and your opinion on it is noted and irrelevant. “I want to work with the hard cases.”

  Tom’s mustache quivered. “The hard cases?”

  “Souls stuck where I was stuck. The ones who chose control over love. Certainty over connection. Being right over being kind.” She paused. “The ones who lost people because they couldn’t accept that the world didn’t fit their categories.”

  Tom was quiet for a moment. For the first time in their entire acquaintance, his mustache was completely still.

  “I’ll process the paperwork,” he said softly.

  * * *

  She was good at it.

  Really good.

  Not because she was wise—though she’d grown wiser. Not because she was kind—though she’d grown kinder. She was good at it because she didn’t pretend.

  When a soul sat across from her—a father who’d disowned his gay son, a mother who’d sent her autistic daughter to a “cure” program, a brother who’d refused to use his sibling’s pronouns—Piper didn’t lecture. Didn’t moralize. Didn’t recite the cosmic point values of compassion versus cruelty.

  She just said: “I did that too.”

  And they listened. Because she meant it.

  She developed new rehabilitation programs, tailored to the specific flavor of failure she knew best. She pitched them to the cats, who communicated their approval through the usual feline channels—a slow blink from the grey tabby, an ear twitch from the calico, and on one memorable occasion, the tiny black kitten falling asleep on her proposal, which she was pretty sure was the highest honor in the cosmic bureaucracy.

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  The programs had names that Piper was privately quite proud of:

  Authenticity Over Ego—for souls who’d prioritized being right over being loving.

  When Sorry Isn’t Enough—for souls learning that an apology is the beginning, not the end.

  Respecting Others’ Boundaries—for souls who needed to understand that forgiveness and reconciliation are not the same thing. That someone can release you from their pain without inviting you back into their life.

  And the hardest one. The one closest to her own heart:

  Growth Without Reward.

  For souls who needed to learn that you don’t get better so that the people you hurt will come back. You get better so that you stop hurting people. And if the ones you hurt have already healed without you—if they’ve built beautiful lives that don’t include you—then your growth is still worth it. Still necessary. Still yours.

  Even if no one claps.

  +3,000 points: Teaching what you’ve learned

  * * *

  The souls came to her in waves.

  A woman who’d kicked her teenage son out of the house for wearing a dress. She sat in Piper’s office with her arms crossed and her jaw set, and Piper recognized every ounce of that defensiveness because she’d invented half of it.

  “He was confused,” the woman insisted. “I was protecting him.”

  “From what?” Piper asked.

  “From—from being weird. From being different. From getting hurt.”

  “How did that work out?”

  The woman’s arms tightened. “That’s not fair.”

  “No,” Piper agreed. “It wasn’t.”

  A long silence.

  “I had a sister,” Piper said. “She was transgender. And I told myself all the same things you’re telling me right now. That I was protecting her. That I knew better. That if she’d just be normal, everything would be fine.”

  The woman looked at her.

  “She’s fine, by the way,” Piper added. “My sister. She’s magnificent. Has thirty-two thousand points and doesn’t check them. She didn’t need my protection. She needed my love. And I gave her judgment instead, and she went out and built a spectacular existence without me, and you know what?”

  “What?”

  “That’s the best possible outcome. Not for me. For her.”

  The woman’s arms slowly uncrossed.

  It wasn’t a breakthrough. Not yet. Breakthroughs didn’t happen in one conversation—Piper knew that better than anyone. But it was a crack. A tiny fissure in the armor. Enough for a sliver of light to get in.

  Piper had learned to be patient with cracks. She’d had 847 lives to develop the skill.

  * * *

  Time continued to pass. Meaninglessly. Beautifully.

  Piper’s point total climbed, though she rarely looked at it anymore. Points were for people who still needed external validation, and Piper was trying very hard to not be that person. She checked once, by accident, when a notification floated past her peripheral vision while she was reviewing a case file.

  87,426.

  She stared at the number. It was—well. It was a lot. Enough for anything she wanted. Asher had explained the options ages ago (or recently, or simultaneously—time, etc.):

  Higher realms. Administrative positions. Immediate reincarnation with the deluxe package—every attribute maxed out, a life so charmed it would make her Luna incarnation look like hard mode. Even “moving on” to whatever lay beyond the afterlife, the next next thing, the mystery past the mystery.

  The cats would approve any of it. She’d more than earned it. The grey tabby had personally delivered the notification by dropping it on her desk and sitting on it, which was essentially a cosmic letter of recommendation.

  “I’d like to stay,” Piper told Asher.

  Asher’s form shifted—surprised, maybe, or pleased, or both. With Asher it was always hard to tell. “Are you sure? You’ve more than earned—”

  “I’m sure.”

  Because this wasn’t purgatory anymore. It wasn’t punishment. It wasn’t even rehabilitation.

  It was purpose.

  She was helping souls avoid the mistakes she’d made across 847 lifetimes. Creating programs that might have helped the original Piper Reilly—the one who died at forty-five with cold coffee and unfolded laundry and a cat she didn’t pet enough and a sister she didn’t love loudly enough. Programs that might have helped her see Sarah for who she was before it was too late.

  She couldn’t go back. She couldn’t undo it. But she could make sure that the next soul who sat across from a sibling’s truth had a better chance of choosing love over fear.

  That was enough. That was everything.

  * * *

  One day—or one moment, or one eternity, depending on how you measured—a new file appeared on her desk.

  Piper picked it up. Read the first line of the intake summary:

  Soul rejected transgender sibling. Low point total. Significant potential for growth. Recommended for specialized rehabilitation: “Authenticity Over Ego” program.

  She closed her eyes. Opened them.

  On the corner of her desk, sitting with the supreme indifference of a being who had witnessed the heat death of several practice universes and was unimpressed by all of them, was Grim.

  Real Grim. Cosmic Grim. In his tiny bowtie.

  He’d started wearing it again recently. Piper suspected this was an act of pure cat audacity—that the other cats had told him accessories were no longer necessary now that she could see their true forms, and Grim had slow-blinked at them and kept wearing it anyway. Because Grim did what Grim wanted, and what Grim wanted was a bowtie. Which was, if you thought about it, the most cat thing in the entire cosmos.

  He looked at Piper. Slow-blinked.

  This one was simple. No universes in it. No cosmic revelations or multidimensional truths. Just the warm, steady, ordinary-miraculous message of a cat who has chosen you and keeps choosing you, over and over, for reasons he will never explain because explaining things is for dogs.

  This is what you were meant to do. Not reconciliation with Sarah. This. Helping others learn what you learned.

  Piper smiled. Reached out and scratched behind his cosmic ears, right in the spot where interdimensional fur met regular fur, the spot that made his purr resonate through exactly one and a half additional dimensions.

  “Thanks for never giving up on me,” she whispered.

  Grim purred. The sound was small this time. Deliberately small. The sound of a vast, ancient being choosing to be just a cat for a moment, because sometimes that was what someone needed. Not cosmic revelation. Not infinite wisdom. Just a warm, purring presence on the corner of a desk, wearing a slightly crooked bowtie.

  That’s what cats do, the purr seemed to say. We see potential even when you can’t.

  Piper turned to the new file. Took a breath she didn’t need. Got to work.

  Her point counter glowed softly in her peripheral vision:

  87,426.

  More than enough to move on.

  But she was exactly where she needed to be.

  * * *

  Piper at her desk, helping another soul learn what took her lifetimes to understand.

  Grim on the corner, watching with those infinite yellow eyes. Bowtie slightly crooked. Purring.

  The cosmic cat beings above, running their mysterious universe with perfect feline logic—filing important documents under “comfortable to sit on,” scheduling existential revelations between naps, and managing the fate of all souls everywhere with the serene confidence of beings who have never once, in all of eternity, doubted themselves.

  And somewhere, in another realm, Sarah. Living her beautiful, authentic life, unburdened by the sister who once hurt her. Earning points she doesn’t check. Helping souls she’ll never meet. Moving forward, always forward, into the kind of wholeness that Piper now knows she was never meant to be part of.

  Both of them, finally, at peace.

  Piper opened the file.

  “So,” she said to the new soul sitting across from her—who had the same defensive posture and the same terrified eyes and the same rigid certainty that they’d been right—“want to tell me about your sibling?”

  The soul’s jaw tightened. “I don’t see why I should. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Piper smiled. Not unkindly.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I used to think that too.”