The Empathy Merchant

She sells grief. Not metaphorically — in a world where emotional memory can be extracted, bottled, and consumed, Mara has built a quiet business trading in other people's losses, letting the lonely rent a dead stranger's heartbreak for an hour. But when a client returns a memory that shouldn't exist yet, Mara realizes someone has been selling her own future — and that the most devastating emotion in her catalog has always been hers.