But those two men, under the bad boy persona, had soft hearts, and we were all hurt when I broke it off before they could breach the wall around me. I can’t be honest with a man about who I am. I can’t tell them I have premonitions. They would think I was looney. I could prove it to them, but then they would know I was looney. Plus, my premonitions are a huge part of who I am, what I battle. If I can’t share that, we don’t have an honest relationship.

Besides, who would want to live with, or be married to, someone who not only sees premonitions but tries to stop them, rescue people or not rescue people based on objective/subjective/playing God reasons? It’s head-case city up in my brain, with moderate to high doses of depression and anxiety, with some of that depression and anxiety buried in the sand and flames of a faraway place.

I have a put-together front, a smile that says all is well, like many women, but beyond the smile, scrape it a bit, and you’d see a semi-wreck who tries hard not to give in to many mental health issues.

I would like to sleep with Marco. I would.

But how do I sleep with Marco, walk away, and not let the relationship grow into something else? Marco is super interesting. He’s deep. And he’s a thriving, sexy man who would not sleep with a woman who he knew would walk away. That’s not who he is. He doesn’t deserve that kind of meanness and disrespect, either. No one does.

Marriage is out of the question, even if I allowed him to get to know the true me.

I don’t want to have children. What if this premonition thing is genetic, starting with me? My mother doesn’t have it, my aunts don’t have it, Jules doesn’t have it, but my grandma had mental health issues galore. Maybe she was having premonitions. She never mentioned it, never had any predictions, but maybe she had something and it was passed on to me in a different form.

I will not risk passing along this terror to any other human being. I will not inflict this on someone else. I will not have my kid suffering as I have suffered.

The most insurmountable problem was this, though: I could not be with Marco, as it would be a threat to his life. My premonition had told me so.

* * *

Chief Reginald Ass Burn watched me climb into my truck after work on Wednesday. He was parked at the end of Chrysanthemum Way, between the bakery and library, and standing like a beached whale next to his police car. I saw him spying on me when I was chatting with Ernetta Oliver outside the bookstore, people playing in the waves of the bay behind us.