Hook
In the third year of the Emotional Labor Act, grief becomes deductible — and Wendla Ozols, a mid-grade auditor in Riga's Section 4 office, is assigned to verify a widower's claim that his wife was worth €412,000 in suffering.
Escalation
- To substantiate the claim she must do what the statute requires: reconstruct the marriage line by line, interviewing neighbors, subpoenaing the couple's playlists, timing how long he stood at the bus stop where she used to wait — and she finds the €412,000 is, if anything, modest.
- Word gets out that Section 4 approves generously, and the claims arrive in avalanche: a man deducting the death of a dog he never owned, a woman itemizing a daughter who is alive but has stopped calling. Wendla develops a private, uncodified instinct for the real ones, and her approval rate makes her a legend to the public and a problem to the Ministry.
- The Ministry solves the problem by promoting her to write the official Valuation Tables — grief per year of marriage, per unanswered phone call, per shared mortgage — and the tables work so well that hospice social workers start handing them to families before the death, so they can plan.
- A junior auditor flags an anomaly: for four consecutive filing years, Wendla Ozols has declared zero. No losses, no dependents, no grief of any kind. Under the Act, a zero declaration triggers mandatory review, and the file lands on the desk of the widower from her very first case, now employed in Section 4 because she recommended him.
✦ Twist
He audits her the way she taught him — line by line, bus stop by bus stop — and discovers she has been quietly underdeclaring for years, not to cheat the state but because her own losses, correctly itemized under her own tables, would have entitled her to a refund larger than the total grief budget of the Republic; the state's final judgment is that she must accept the money, and she spends the rest of the novel trying to find something in the world expensive enough to spend it on.
💡 The engine is a tax form applied with perfect literal sincerity to something that has no price — the comedy and the devastation both come from the machine never once blinking.