“I love you, too, darling daughter,” my mother said. “You and your sister and my sisters.”

“I love you, too, my fairy sprite,” Aunt Camellia said, attaching a plastic butterfly that wiggled on a spring.

“I’ve always loved you,” Aunt Iris said, pressing down on the sequins. “No need to get mushy about it.”

It was a sweet moment.

Until a cloud came over my mother’s face, dark as a thundering night.

* * *

After school one day, when I was fourteen years old, I had a premonition. I hadn’t told my friend Emily I had premonitions because my parents said I shouldn’t tell anyone on the island. Jules was sworn to secrecy, too. They did know that sometimes I took action with the premonitions in order to prevent them from happening, and they helped me sometimes, too, to save someone, but we all tried to work as quietly and as anonymously as possible.

My father, being in the military, was especially helpful on our “reconnaissance missions,” or our “spy sorties,” or our “Victorious Adventures.” He named them so that I wouldn’t be so afraid of what I’d seen and would view helping people as an adventure, not a scary burden.

I had a premonition about Emily’s mother, Patsy. I saw her with a man I didn’t recognize. He was tall with a reddish beard. In my premonition, they had a terrible fight and he shook her, then pushed her, and her head hit the wood floors in her kitchen with a bounce. The blood spilled into a dark puddle, and she died.

The boyfriend stood over her, panting, furious, then scared. He started to shake her, calling her name, begging her to “Wake up, Patsy! Oh, my God. Oh, my God! Patsy!” He started to cry.

I was petrified. Sure enough, Emily told me that her mother had started dating a man she didn’t like. I met the man, who had a reddish beard, and I didn’t like him, either. I told my parents my premonition, and I swear their faces went white.

They invited Emily; Patsy; and the boyfriend, Gavin, over for dinner at Rose Bloom Cottage. After they left, my parents talked and I eavesdropped.

“I can see it, Poppy,” my father said to my mother when they thought I was in my bedroom. “He’s controlling. He’s too intense. He watches Patsy all the time. In the military we get rid of that kind of guy.”

“I didn’t like him at all,” my mother said. “There’s a simmering anger there. He’s so possessive and suspicious.”

My parents sat down to decide what to do. Both of them soon told Patsy, gently, that they didn’t like Gavin, didn’t trust him, were concerned. She was offended and hurt and did not break up with him.

So that strategy didn’t work.