“It's my party and I'll cry if I want to,” Cora Wilcox sang under her breath, stirring a half-melted ice cream sundae. Her favorite little coffee shop was mostly empty this time of night, which suited her just fine at the moment. Cora kicked idly at the bag under her feet — it held her uniform, dirty from a full day's exhausting work. Usually, she'd be home by now, tripping over her cat Hamish as he wove his stupid way around her feet, waiting for his dinner. But instead, she'd changed into a high-necked, dark green dress that she'd always hated, and parked her car at the cafe around the corner from the church she drove past on her way to work each day. The dress was itchy, and frumpy, and high-necked — but it was the only thing she owned that successfully disguised her frankly ridiculous figure, and as such was the only option for somber occasions like tonight.

“Two years tonight, Audy,” she murmured now, pitching her voice under the tinny music that always played in the cafe. “Two years since you ditched me, you skinny old cow.” A sad little smile pulled the corners of her lips upward. Audrina was only four years older than her, but she'd always teased her about the decades of difference in their outlooks on life.

They'd met at work, back when Cora was just an apprentice. She'd been at the hospital checking up on a patient who'd needed to be transferred after some complications cropped up during labor. A redheaded nurse had bustled past her, arms full of clipboards, grim expression on her face — and crashed into a wheelchair that had been carelessly left in the corridor. Choking down her laughter, Cora had helped the young nurse up.

“Thank you, thank you,” Audrina had been murmuring distractedly. “God, what a day, you ever have one of those days where just absolutely nothing goes right and I'm so out of my depth with all these patients and — thanks, I'll take those —”

Cora withheld the armful of clipboards. “Not until you let me give you something.”

“Huh?”

She reached into her satchel and pulled out a bottle of essential oils. It was one of the first aromatherapy remedies she'd put together, and she pressed it into the nurse's hand.

“Lavender, rosemary, and oak for grounding. Breathe it in whenever you're feeling overwhelmed. It'll help. Go on.”

The nurse didn't look especially impressed (they were always skeptics, tightly-wound women like that) but Cora waved the charts at her and she obediently sniffed the bottle of oils.

“It smells — actually, that smells really nice.”

“I'm Cora.”

“Audrina.”

Cora dumped the files in her arms again. “Look after yourself. You're no use to your patients if you've died of stress.”

They ran into each other a few more times around the hospital, and it wasn't long before they'd struck up a friendship. It was hard to socialize with the kind of demanding jobs they both had, and they found kindred spirits in one another. Audrina was probably the most important relationship in Cora's life, when she thought about it — she had no brothers or sisters, very little extended family, a father she'd never met and a mother she almost-never spoke to. The idea of finding a romantic relationship was a joke, too, with the amount of work she had on her plate — she'd always joked with Audrina that if they didn't make time to date sooner or later, they'd have to wind up marrying each other.

And now she was gone. Two years ago today, disappeared off the face of the planet in a whirlwind of missing person's reports, sleepless nights waiting for the phone to ring, watching every news report with bated breath, praying for information, any information about a young woman with a mane of bright red hair...and then the worst part. The part where she stopped checking every night — where the web searches became every other day, not every day. The part where the bright flame of hope and determination began to flicker and burn out, day in and day out with no word from anyone of where Audrina could have gone. The awful, awful day when she realized she had gone a whole afternoon without thinking of Audrina once — the day she managed to forget her dear friend. That made her feel terrible about herself. It didn’t matter that it had only been a short while — she’d forgotten. For a little while, it had been as though Audrina was never even there.

“Hope Scotland's nice,” Cora murmured now, toasting the empty air with the last spoonful of ice cream. Audrina would have tutted at her for such an unhealthy dinner — but Audrina wasn't here, was she? It had always been Cora's secret hope that Audrina hadn't been killed or abducted or left unrecognizable in some deadly accident, that she'd just gotten on a plane to Scotland like she'd always dreamed of doing. It was impossible, Cora knew that in her heart — but it eased the sadness a little, to imagine that shock of bright red hair against the Scottish moors. It was all she'd ever wanted, that trip to Scotland. And now she'd never be able to take it.

And if that wasn't bad enough, she had to go to a funeral tonight. She wasn't really allowed to call it a funeral, of course — funerals were for people who'd been born already. Didn't make the loss any less sharp, of course. Didn't change the grief of the parents, or the finality of the death. Cora had been a qualified midwife for five years now, and she still hated the word 'miscarriage'. There was something so cold about it. As though all that potential, all that love and hope and magic slipping away wasn't a real death. It made it harder for the families to grieve, she'd always thought. It certainly made it harder for her. When one of Audrina's patients died in the emergency room, there were structures in place for her to grieve. Cora's patients went more quietly — an unusual pain in the stomach, a bit of unexpected bleeding, a worried ultrasound and — that was it.

And this one was just so unfair. A first-time mother, young, strong, in perfect health — prenatal yoga three times a week, absolutely strict about a healthy, balanced diet, called Cora four times a week to check about which brands of cheese were best for the baby. The young father, doing absolutely everything he could — he'd read every book on Cora's rather extensive reading list by the end of the first trimester. They had a list of names picked out, the nursery painted, preschools already shortlisted. Everything had been perfect. And then, out of the blue, the little girl had just slipped away one night. Just like that. One day a happy, expecting couple — the next day, nothing. It wasn't fair.

Cora sighed, rising from the table and dropping a healthy tip on the table before gathering her bag and heading out into the night. The funeral — the memorial service — it would help that young couple begin to heal. Whatever Cora could do to help that happen, she was going to do. Didn't matter that it was the anniversary of her best friend's disappearance and she'd rather be home cuddling her cats and crying. If anything, Audrina's mysterious loss had taught her more about what her patients felt when they went through losses like this. No reason for it, no justification but the strange whims of God.

“You move in mysterious ways, alright,” she murmured as she climbed into her car, adjusting her rear-vision mirror. There was a set of rosary beads draped around it. Cora wasn't the kind of Catholic who liked to proclaim her faith for all to see and hear, especially with patients — faith was a deeply personal matter, and she didn't want to make any of her patients the least bit uncomfortable with having her around. She certainly wouldn't bring up her beliefs about the afterlife, either. But it was a private and personal comfort, knowing that whatever happened, God was keeping an eye on her.

She checked her makeup in the mirror now, tutting as she wiped away a few mascara smudges and scolding herself for crying. Medical professionals needed stricter self-control, her mentor had always lectured her. She looked hideous when she cried. Some girls could get away with it — but Cora had pale skin, only accentuated by her dark, wavy hair, and any hint of weeping brought hideous red blotches to her entire face. She hated it, but it didn't make it any easier to hold the tears back once they were brewing.

“Get it together or you'll look like a monster all night, Cora-my-girl,” she muttered into the mirror, grinning a little. Audrina used to call her that — it had crept into her own vocabulary since her disappearance. Right. Off to the funeral, help the family come to terms with the awful thing that had happened to them — then she could go home and cry into a pint of Ben and Jerry's.

Cora turned the key in the ignition. Later, she'd look back on this as one of the last normal moments of her life.