I figured out I could pour my joy into little glass bottles.
I sold the heart-flutter of him handing me white roses at the Boot for $400.
I sold the satisfaction of landing the Sazerac account for $2,800.
I sold the joy of walking Tessa down the aisle to Marcus for $14,000.
I bottled my own feelings and traded up to a corner unit overlooking the Mississippi, with a money-market account that didn't blink at a six-figure balance.
But I couldn't laugh anymore.
Then one afternoon, a man worth billions — a man who hadn't kept a meal down in years — came looking for me.
Sterling Whitford Shaw IV. Skin the color of typing paper. Wrist bones like piano keys. He didn't waste a syllable.
"Miss Léveille. Sell me what's left."
I gave him the last sweet thing I had.
He lived.
And that same night, I figured out something else.
Every person who'd ever bought a bottle from me was, very slowly, turning into me.
The first time it happened, I was on the St. Charles streetcar, riding home from being fired.
Caroline, my supervisor at Vieux Carré Strategy, had pulled my Sazerac follow-up deck into her morning meeting and pitched it as her own. Then, in the same meeting, she'd told the room that I was "missing the relational layer." That clients wanted a feeling when they left the room. That I wasn't giving them that.
She'd handed me a termination letter in a creamy envelope, the kind you send a wedding RSVP in.
I stood near the rear doors with the envelope folded in my hand. The streetcar rocked. The conductor called out Napoleon Avenue, Napoleon Avenue, doors opening on your left.
My phone buzzed.
It wasn't a text. It was a banner from an app I'd never installed, in the same matte black as my bank's app, sliding down from the top of the screen.
Sellable emotion detected: joy. Package for resale?
I assumed scam. Phishing. My thumb tapped Yes before my brain caught up.
A small glass bottle appeared in my palm.
It was no bigger than a perfume sample. Cork stopper. Pink liquid inside, the exact color of the inside of a seashell. A cream cardstock tag dangled from the neck on cotton string.
Boy with white roses at the Boot, sophomore year. Heart-flutter, 72%. Suggested floor price: $400.
I went still.
The Boot. Pierce Lecompte standing at the door of the Boot on a damp October Friday, sophomore year, holding a bouquet of white grocery-store roses like he was offering me a baby. His ears bright red. I've been working up to this for months.
I hadn't let myself remember that in years.
Looking at the bottle, something in my chest unhooked itself and dropped two floors.
I tried to smile. My face didn't know how.
The man in the seat next to me was staring at my palm.
He was in a suit, mid-forties, gold wedding band, eyes wet. His voice came out thin.
"How much."
I stepped back from him.
He didn't blink. His phone was already in his hand. Zelle screen up.
"My daughter's surgery just failed. I'd like to remember the day she was born. How happy I was. Four hundred. Yes?"
The transfer alert pinged.
I gave him the bottle.
He pulled the cork with his teeth and tipped it onto his tongue.
Three seconds later he was crouched in the corner of the streetcar with his head in his hands, shoulders heaving.
Not crying like grief. Crying like joy returned to the body after you'd accepted it was gone.
I looked down at my bank app.
For the first time in my whole working life I understood that I was carrying around something worth more than my job.
My joy.
I sold the second bottle three days after I packed up my desk.
Caroline posted on the Vieux Carré Strategy team Slack — the public channel, not the DM — a paragraph framed as a "lesson learned." Joy Léveille's contract was not extended due to limited stress tolerance. As we scale, please use this as a reminder that resilience is a core team competency.
A row of thumbs-up reactions stacked under it. The intern I'd kept up rewriting until 3 a.m. seventeen times — the one whose name I'd taught Caroline to pronounce — added a little laughing-face emoji.
I sat on the floor of my Mid-City apartment with the laptop open, and my sternum felt like a stove burner turned all the way up.
Then the Aperture banner came down.
Sellable emotion detected: career-win satisfaction. 89% purity. Suggested floor price: $2,800.
A gold-tinted bottle settled into my palm. The tag read: The night the Sazerac pitch landed. Calling Mom from the stairwell at the agency. 89%.
That had been last spring. The bonus check had been the largest I'd ever held. I'd hidden in the back stairwell, my forehead against the cool concrete wall, and called my mother in Plaquemines Parish — except my mother had been dead for four years. So I'd called her sister, my aunt Yvette, who'd said in my mother's voice, Ma joie, regarde-toi. Camille would be so proud.
I listed the bottle on a marketplace Asa Holloway would later tell me was technically called the gray net — not deep dark web, not regular eBay, something in between. Buyer handle: Crescent. Profile picture: a square of black.
A bid came in within ten minutes.
Can you deliver same-day? I'd like to take it to a dinner tonight.
I filled in an address downtown and paid a same-day courier on Postmates.
At nine that night I was scrolling the Times-Picayune business section and an item slid by.
Shaw Maritime CEO Sterling Whitford Shaw IV makes rare appearance at acquisition dinner.
The photograph showed him beside a champagne tower at a downtown hotel. Black tuxedo. Cheekbones like a knife edge. White-paper skin. He wasn't smiling — that would have been too much for the body in the picture — but the corner of his mouth was up half a millimeter.
I stared at his eyes.
It wasn't the standard tycoon's let's-get-this-photo-over-with face.
It was the look of someone who hadn't eaten in days and had just gotten a single hot mouthful of something.
The next morning, Crescent left a review on the marketplace.
Excellent. Contact me when you have more.
A $14,000 tip rode in behind it.
I sat with my phone in my hand and felt my palms get hot.
I shouldn't have been excited.
But broke for too long means broke in the head. Money walks in, the room tilts.
Six months in, I had a catalog.
I categorized by emotion type: heart-flutter, friendship, achievement, family, long-awaited reunion. The purer the emotion, the higher the listing. Synthetic compound emotions — the satisfaction of being right when she's wrong — moved at volume but cheap. The clean stuff was rare.
I sold the pride of opening my Tulane scholarship letter. I sold the first time I put my mother on a plane to see her sister in Houston, both of us laughing at the security gate over the way her purse went through the scanner. I sold the joy I'd felt walking Tessa down the aisle in a French Quarter courtyard, brass band tuning up, the moment she turned and saw Marcus and her whole face went open.
The Tessa-wedding bottle sold for $14,000 to a buyer in Lakeview.
She was a divorcée. Two days after delivery she sent me seventeen voice memos. I listened to one and ten seconds of the next, and in every one she was laughing.
The last one she said: Joy-girl, thank you. I had to tell you. I finally believe again. I finally believe there's a kind of love that doesn't end in lawyers. I'll buy whatever else you have. Anything.
I listened to it with my new apartment's river-side windows open. The barge horns came up the bend.
There was wind in my ears. That was all.
Tessa came over to see the new place. She walked through the door and screamed. She ran her hands along the row of heels in my closet and opened the fridge to take inventory of the imported lychees and the white peaches and the bottle of Krug someone had sent me as a thank-you gift from God knew where.
I poured her a glass of Sancerre.
She stopped.
"Joy."
"Hm."
"Why aren't you smiling?"
My hand paused on the lip of the glass.
"I got Botox."
She believed it. She rolled her eyes and called me a rich bitch and made me show her the bathroom and the bathroom in the second bathroom.
She didn't know that every smile she'd ever pulled out of me at her own wedding was already sealed in pink-tinted glass and inside another woman in Lakeview.
That night she got drunk on my couch and rolled onto her side and said, eyes already closing, "Joy. Promise me you'll be happier than I am."
I tried to say I promise.
My throat filled up like cotton.
What came out was a small soft syllable.
"Mm."
Bottle forty-three was when the Aperture app first issued a yellow warning.
Joy reserve below 5%. Continued sale may impair emotion-detection.
I didn't read it carefully. I was in a stylist's chair on Magazine Street that morning, getting my hair done before a dinner. The realtor on the corner unit had just texted that my closing funds had cleared. My bank's relationship manager had called me Ms. Léveille with a soft new emphasis. Caroline — Caroline, who had publicly fired me for being too brittle for the relational layer — had liked the photo of my new view on Instagram.
I screenshot the heart and sent it to Pierce.
Pierce Lecompte. My college boyfriend. The man inside the only memory I hadn't been able to put a tag on.
Five years ago he'd gone to Oxford for a graduate degree in nineteenth-century French poetry — the Symbolists, he liked to say, swirling his glass — and we'd done the dignified call-it-off. He'd come back two years ago. I'd been at a dinner with him exactly never since.
The first thing he did, the week he texted me back about the Instagram heart, was ask me to dinner.
I wore a new dress, a slip in dusty rose silk that the dressing-room mirror had told me a year ago I couldn't afford. I sat at a corner table at Coquette and watched the bartender shake something.
Pierce was forty minutes late.
He walked in with a girl on his arm.
She was tiny, blonde, in a pale linen suit that whispered Beacon Hill. She smiled at me — clean and sweet and ready — and waited to be introduced.
"Joy," Pierce said. "This is Madison Cabot. My fiancée."
I looked at him.
There was no crack inside me.
I wasn't even sad.
Pierce relaxed his shoulders an inch.
"You're calmer than I thought you'd be."
Madison reached across the table and pushed the menu toward me. Her voice was gentle.
"Pierce told me you two used to be very in love. I was a little nervous."
I picked up my water glass.
The water was cold.
I drank it. My stomach didn't register the temperature.
Pierce was watching me. He frowned.
"You're different, Joy."
I looked up.
"People change."
He kept watching, the way you watch a witness you've decided is guilty.
"You used to look at me like I was made of light. Now you only look at money."
The sentence landed and my phone buzzed against the tablecloth.
Crescent.
I need to see you. Name your price.
I looked back at Pierce. I smiled at him, smooth and small.
His face got worse.
He didn't know I'd practiced that smile in the bathroom mirror for three days.
It was the best customer-service smile I owned.