Gradually I was forced to accept that I would never see my mother again, but still I wandered. Even in winter, it was better to be abroad in the cold than home in that hateful cottage with a violent foster father and a foster mother who was terrified of her husband.

I didn’t fully understand why he was doing it. As I spent more time away, he reacted ever more fiercely, trying to beat me into submission. Did he beat me because he felt I was disobedient and beyond his control? I wondered. If so, the beatings just made me worse. He didn’t know what he was doing; he was like a dumb animal, acting without thinking. It frightened me but didn’t change the way I behaved. And still I would not cry.

Then, on the eve of my thirteenth birthday, everything changed. I woke up suddenly in the middle of the night and saw my first ghost. It was the night of the full moon, and a bright shaft of yellow light illuminated the foot of my bed. There was a fat old lady sitting across my legs, squashing me. She was so heavy that I felt as if the bed might collapse at any moment. She looked at me, opened her mouth, and gave a cackle. She had no teeth, just slobbery gums, and she was blind in one eye—it was all milky white.

As I screamed in shock and fear, the weight left my legs. The ghost floated upward and disappeared through the ceiling, drool dibbling from her open mouth.

My frantic scream woke up my father, and I received another beating.

That was the last time he ever hit me.

Before the week was out, another gift had emerged—the first one my true mother had spoken of: that of empathy. I will never forget the moment when it came to me.

I’d been walking through the center of the village when I saw a youth slouched on a bench opposite the greengrocer’s. He was staring at the shop doorway. His face was blank and expressionless, but I had to stop, suddenly deeply aware of the sadness that filled him. He was fighting to hold back tears.

What radiated from him was overpowering; it brought a lump to my throat and tears to my own eyes. It was much more than just a feeling: I knew what he was thinking. He was remembering how, as a young child, he’d once sat on that very bench waiting for his mother to come out of that shop. She’d come out and smiled at him, put down her shopping bag, and opened her arms wide. He’d run straight into them.

But now he was almost fully grown; his mother had died the previous winter. He was concentrating hard, trying to see that moment of happiness again, seeking to re-create the past.

I could almost read his thoughts—and it was painful to share them, so I moved on quickly.

This gift wasn’t something I’d be telling other people about. Nobody would like the idea of someone probing inside their head.