She began, cautiously, to practice.

The first experiment was small: she went to a coffee shop near the library and ordered a cup of tea, which was served to her by a young man with a shaved head and a tattoo of a bird on his forearm. The bird was mid-flight, wings swept back, and she found herself staring at it while he rang up her order, wondering if it meant something or if it meant nothing, if people on Earth got tattoos for reasons the way witches got birthmarks—as signs of something deeper or simply as decorations, marks made on the body without cosmic significance, the way a line is drawn on water.

She watched his face as he handed her the cup, looking for some sign of what he felt. The micro-expressions that witches in the Veil were trained to read, the subtle tells of the emotional body that preceded words and sometimes contradicted them. In the Veil, you could feel the emotional state of a room the way you felt its temperature—with your whole body, with the part of you that was tuned to the frequency of other beings. You could stand in a crowded market and sense, without looking at anyone, which person was afraid and which was joyful and which was lying.

She found nothing. The young man's face was pleasant, professionally pleasant, the way faces were pleasant in service roles in every world she had ever known. She could not read him at all. She could not read anyone.

But that was the point, she realized. She was trying to read him as a witch, using the perceptual toolkit she had developed in a world where magic suffused every interaction, where emotions were not just visible but palpable, where you could feel the emotional state of a room the way you felt its temperature. Here, she had no magic. She was as blind as any human to the deeper emotional truths of the people around her.

She would have to do this the human way. The slow way. The way that required patience and attention and the willingness to be wrong a thousand times before you were right.

She went back to the coffee shop the next day, and the day after that. She ordered tea and sat at a small table by the window and watched the people who came in. Most of them were absorbed in their phones, those small glowing rectangles that everyone in this world carried like talismans, tapping and swiping with a focus that seemed almost devotional. Others were in conversations she could not hear but could observe—the gestures, the facial expressions, the way bodies leaned toward each other or away, the particular quality of attention that meant I am listening versus the quality that meant I am waiting for my turn to speak. She was taking notes in a small notebook she had bought at a dollar store, documenting everything: how people greeted each other, how they touched, how they smiled or did not smile, how they left.

She was, she realized, studying love the way a naturalist might study a species in its habitat. She was cataloging behaviors, looking for patterns, trying to understand the grammar of human affection. Because that was what she needed to generate, or to receive: a specific kind of happiness in another person, a happiness that had her as its object and that she could recognize and reciprocate.

But the more she watched, the more confused she became. Love, in this world, did not look the way she had expected. It was not the grand passion she had read about in the Veil's literature—the all-consuming fire that poets wrote about, the madness that drove people to irrational acts, the perfect union of souls across the boundaries of the self. It was smaller than that. Quieter. A man buying two coffees and handing one to a woman without being asked. A mother adjusting her child's coat with a touch that was barely a touch, more a gesture than a contact. Two old men sitting at a table in silence, not speaking, not needing to speak, the silence between them full of something she could not name.

She did not understand any of it.

But she kept watching. She went to the park and sat on her bench and watched couples hold hands. She went to the library's magazine section and read articles about relationships, about attachment, about the psychology of love. She bought a secondhand book at a thrift store for fifty cents—What Are You Feeling? A Beginner's Guide to Emotional Intelligence—and read it cover to cover, taking notes, underlining passages, arguing with it in the margins the way she had once argued with magical theory texts.

The book was infuriating. It was written in simple language, for simple people, and it treated emotions as things that could be managed and categorized and controlled. It talked about "healthy boundaries" and "communication skills" and "emotional availability," as though love were a skill that could be learned rather than a force that struck you without warning or reason. It described emotions as having "triggers" and "responses," as though feeling were a circuit that could be rewired, as though the heart were a machine that could be calibrated.

But it was also, she admitted grudgingly, useful. Because it gave her a vocabulary for things she had felt but never named. It helped her understand, in a rough and preliminary way, what she was looking for when she looked at another person and tried to determine whether they might be capable of loving her. She was not looking for passion—she did not think she could inspire passion, with her ordinary face and her blank history and her total lack of social skills. She was looking for something quieter. Something more fundamental.

She was looking for a person who might see her and be glad.

She tested this theory carefully, over the following weeks. She smiled at strangers—not widely, not in a way that felt false or demanding, but in the small way she had observed in the park, the way people smiled at each other when they passed on the sidewalk and their eyes accidentally met. Most people did not smile back. Some did. The ones who did became data points in her ongoing study.

She made small talk with the cashier at the grocery store, a woman named Brenda who was perhaps sixty and who always wore the same green smock and who had a particular way of bagging groceries that suggested a person who had done this exact task ten thousand times and had developed, through repetition, a kind of quiet mastery. "You're always buying tea," Brenda said to her one day, after Mira had paid for her weekly supply. "Must really love it."

"I am learning to," Mira said, and Brenda laughed—a short, surprised laugh, as though Mira had said something unexpected—and that was a kind of happiness, a small one, the happiness of making someone laugh who had not expected to.

She asked June about her life—really asked, listening carefully to the answers—and learned that June had been a bookkeeper for twenty years before her husband left her and she lost her apartment and ended up on the streets. Twenty years of meticulous accounting, of precision and order and the satisfaction of numbers adding up correctly, and then one day the numbers stopped adding up for her personally and everything fell apart. "Numbers don't lie," June said, with a bitterness that was also, Mira suspected, a kind of grief. "People lie. But numbers are honest. That's why I liked them."

She asked Destiny about the baby—she was due in three months, and she was terrified, and she had no family to help her—and learned that Destiny had been planning to name the baby after her grandmother, who had been the only person who ever made her feel like she was worth something. "My grandmother used to say that love wasn't about feeling something," Destiny told her. "It was about deciding something. Deciding that someone mattered, and then acting like it, every day, even when it was hard."

Mira wrote this down in her notebook, carefully.

She was learning the shape of happiness, she realized. Not her own happiness—she was not happy, not yet, not in any sustained way—but the happiness of others. The small, daily happinesses that made a life bearable. A hot meal. A kind word. A hand on the shoulder. The feeling of being known. The particular quality of a room when someone had laughed in it recently, leaving a residue, a warmth, that lingered after the person had gone.

She thought she might be able to provide some of these things. She was not good with people—she knew that about herself, had always known it, had always been more comfortable with books and spells than with the messy, unpredictable terrain of human relationship. But she was patient. She was attentive. She listened in a way that most people did not, because in the Veil, listening was a magical skill, a way of receiving not just words but the truth beneath them, and she had trained it to a fine edge over sixteen years of practice.

She sat on her bench in the park and watched the children play and thought about Destiny's grandmother, who had made her feel like she was worth something. That was the key, Mira thought. That was the frequency she needed to generate, or to receive: the recognition of worth. Someone seeing you and deciding, without reason and without calculation, that you mattered. Not because of what you could do or what you could give, but simply because you were you, and they had noticed, and the noticing had been enough.

She did not know if she mattered. She did not know if there was anything about her, as she was now, in this diminished state, with no magic and no status and no understanding of how to be a person in this world, that was worth loving. But she knew that she had to find out. She had four years and six months left, and she had to start somewhere.

She went back to the shelter and sat next to Destiny, who was reading the same romance novel for the third time, the cover now bent and softened by repeated handling, the pages gone supple with use.

"Can I ask you something?" Mira said.

Destiny looked up. "Sure."

"How did you know—when you were with someone, or thinking about someone—how did you know it was love?"

Destiny stared at her for a moment. Then she laughed—a short, surprised laugh, the kind of laugh that meant I did not expect to be asked this. "Girl," she said. "I don't know if I've ever been in love. I thought I was, once. With my baby's father. But he—" She stopped. Shrugged. A gesture that contained entire conversations. "He wasn't worth it, you know? He wasn't worth the feelings I had for him."

Mira considered this. "So love is when the person is worth it?"

Destiny thought about it. She closed the book, holding her place with one finger, and Mira saw that the page she had been reading was covered in handwriting—Destiny's handwriting, in the margins, annotations in tiny letters. "No," she said slowly. "That's not quite it either. Love is when you think they're worth it. Even when they're not. Even when they don't do anything to deserve it. You just—" She made a vague gesture with her hand, the one that wasn't holding the book. "You just feel it. Like a weather system. It moves in and it takes over and you can't do anything about it. You can't argue with it. You can't make it stop. You just have to let it happen and hope you're not standing in the flood path."

Mira wrote this down in her notebook, carefully. Like a weather system. It moves in and it takes over.

"And it makes you happy?" she asked.

"Sometimes," Destiny said. "Sometimes it's happy. Sometimes it's the most painful thing you've ever felt. But yeah." She paused. "Yeah. When it's real, it makes you happy. Even the pain is a kind of happy, in a way. Because at least you feel something."

Mira closed her notebook. The pen was running out of ink; the words she had written were getting lighter toward the end of each line, as though even the mechanical process of recording was beginning to give up.

"Thank you," she said.

"For what?"

"For telling me. For being honest."

Destiny looked at her with an expression Mira could not quite read—curiosity, maybe, or something warmer, something that might have been the beginning of affection. "You really don't know anything about love, do you?" she said.

"No," Mira admitted. "I really don't."

Destiny shook her head, but she was smiling. "Well," she said. "Guess you've got something to learn."

Mira looked at her—the pregnant teenager with the romance novel and the marginalia and the grandmother's name waiting to be given to a child who did not yet exist—and felt something shift in her chest. Not happiness, exactly. But something adjacent to it. Something that might, with time and attention, grow into the thing she needed.

"Yeah," she said quietly. "I guess I do."

Outside, the sun was going down, the aggressive yellow light softening toward orange, and the shelter was filling with the sounds of the evening routine—footsteps in the hallway, the clang of pots from the kitchen, Alma's voice calling someone in for dinner. The world went on. The world always went on. And she went on with it, learning the shape of happiness one question at a time, one conversation at a time, one small and tentative step toward a thing she did not yet know how to name but was beginning, very slowly, to want.