“You took my baby away from me,” Betsy said. “You took her.” Then she began to cry, from the deepest part of her shattered soul.

The doctor and the nurse had the moral sense, amidst their own shock at the patient’s premonitions, to feel guilty and sick.

* * *

The doctor got super drunk that night and called in sick the next day.

The nurse went home and hugged her oldest daughter extra close.

* * *

The doctor’s girlfriend left him the same week that Betsy’s trial started. She took his guitar collection. He never saw her again. He thought of Betsy and the baby she had lost, and the trial that was being widely covered in the papers. Only the whack jobs believed Betsy truly had a premonition about the father killing his son, her boyfriend. But now she’d predicted, exactly, that his girlfriend was going to leave him and take his guitar collection. Could she really have premonitions?

Guilt washed over him again for his part in taking the baby, and he felt as if he were drowning. Yes, it was his job, but still. He grabbed the fifth of vodka beside him and drank it like milk. Then he stopped. Betsy had also told him that he was going to die in two years, his liver a pickle. He decided he didn’t care. He drank again.

Dr. Rothney died as he lived, in pain, lonely, and alone, thinking of his own mother, who had gone to jail for shooting her boyfriend to protect herself, to protect him. On his last day on Earth, exactly two years after the premonition, he thought of Betsy and her baby and the last beat of his heart was filled with a deep sadness.

Clarissa, the nurse, found out she was pregnant a week later. Her husband had lied to her about the vasectomy. What a selfish, dense man, was her first thought. My God. She had married a man stupid enough to think he could get away with it. She kicked him out, and he spent six months begging her to take him back. He presented new papers showing he’d had a vasectomy. Their fifth child was a gift, a comfort as they dealt with their oldest daughter’s drug addiction.

On the night that her husband told her that her daughter was wearing a red dress and knee-high black boots when she ran from the house, Clarissa and her husband frantically searched for her, based on Betsy’s premonition. They found her in the back room of a drug house. She almost died. Clarissa did CPR, and the ambulance came.

The daughter later became a kindergarten teacher. Her parents were so proud.

The nurse never forgot Betsy. Her premonitions had come true and she had saved Clarissa’s daughter’s life. For the rest of her life, the nurse prayed for Betsy.

Chapter 3

I own a bookstore called Evie’s Books, Cake, and Tea because that’s what I sell: books, cake, and tea. Someone I loved with all my soul taught me to love all three, so it was an easy decision.