Laura collected dead futures with the thoroughness of the archeologist and the serial killer. She didn't construct possible futures, mapping the strengths of their maturity and the fatal vulnerabilities of their childhood — that was her day job — but she kept at her home the same detailed files of what once could might happen later but now it would not.
Attached to each analysis and more thoroughly encrypted she wrote sketches of her own biography in each of those worlds: medical timelines, socioeconomic status, living nightmares she would not have to go through and, more common each month, detailed treasures of possibility strangled before born. She did this every night after a bleakly successful day at work.
It had no practical use — it made her feel worse. But a sharpness in the cost to herself made the guilt lighter, and with that carefully unexamined trade she bought herself from herself another dawn.