Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 98819 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 494(@200wpm)___ 395(@250wpm)___ 329(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 98819 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 494(@200wpm)___ 395(@250wpm)___ 329(@300wpm)
“A heart attack.”
“That’s when I knew I was different. I saw death, and it happened.”
“You have a gift.”
“It’s a curse. I don’t just see death. I am death.” This is why I’ve built myself a fortress of solitude and hidden behind its walls. Why I’ve been careful not to allow anyone to touch me. Why I don’t let anyone in. I can’t allow anyone to see me or know me.
Rex opens his mouth, and I continue again in a rush. I need to get this out before I break down. “It happened again with my aunt. I saw the poisoned darkness spreading through her. I tried to tell her.” I shake my head. “She went to the doctor, and they found it. Cancer, spread everywhere. But it was already over. Again, I was too late.” I swallow around my shame. I’m that little girl again, trying to explain what her dreams impressed upon her. Trying and failing until the horror dawned, and it was always too late.
“After my aunt died, her husband didn’t want anything to do with me. ‘You’re not mine,’ he said. ‘Your family is all gone.’ He told me I was cursed.”
Rex sucks in a breath, but I’m not seeing him. I’m seeing my uncle’s pain-stricken face. I smell my aunt, the jasmine she grew on a trellis off the back porch. The chance at love and a home ripped from me for the third time.
“He said I was meant to die that night with my family, but I didn’t, and now I was spreading the curse around.” My throat has closed, making it painful to speak. Tears fill my eyes, but I hold them back. I don’t deserve them. “He was right.”
Rex’s face comes into focus. I’m afraid to look at him in case he recoils from me, but I have to. He’s my lifeline to the present. I sink into his dark eyes.
“And then. . . I ran. I stole a coat that belonged to my aunt, stuffed my pockets with granola bars, and left. I had to. I was cursed. Death followed me. It would visit anyone I loved.”
“It wasn’t you.” Rex squeezes my hand.
“I would have a vision of someone dying, and then it would happen. What was I supposed to think?”
He squeezes my hand again, and it gives me the strength to continue. “I lived in a park. I found food in dumpsters. I was gone for weeks, even as the leaves turned and it got cold.”
“How old were you?”
I have to think. It was years after my parents died, during a dark time unmarred by holidays or birthdays. “Twelve.”
He sighs. “I was searching for you.”
I squint at him, unable to understand. Then it dawns on me—the journals in his childhood bedroom. The ones I didn’t get a chance to ask him about. It feels like I found them ages ago.
“I was trying to find you. The papers originally printed your name wrong. It took me weeks to work that out. Hamish didn’t understand. He resisted, but I kept going. Finally, he saw how much it meant to me and gave in. We could contact you. Help you. I just knew. . . you were like me. You would understand.”
“I wish you had found me. I was so alone.” I stare into the distance, remembering the dread that would fill me as the sunset crept over the park each night. I would retreat into the shadows of the trees, but not so far that the wild animals would find me. I stayed on the boundary between the woods and the lights and noise of humanity, but not so close that someone could see me. There was a bare sliver of space I could exist in.
He strokes my cheek, and it brings me back. “What happened? What got you off the streets?”
“Lacy Collins happened.” I remember her appearing on the edge of the parking lot where I was dumpster diving for moldy bread. “After working on my family's case, she kept in touch. She would come and check on me from time to time, especially after my aunt died and my uncle told her I’d run away. He made it clear he wouldn’t be my guardian. She searched until she found me. Just in time, too. The night she took me in, the ground froze. My aunt’s coat wouldn’t have been enough.” I shiver, and Rex moves, tucking the blanket around me. “She got me into a group home. I’d run away, and she’d find me again.”
“I remember. Hamish hired a private detective who got close to finding you, but the trail ended with Lacy Collins, and she blocked him at every turn.”
That sounds so much like Lacy that I have to smile. “She checked me into the group home under a false name. She was protective.”