Then, when Patsy had a bruise on her face, my mother called the police chief, who arrested Gavin. But Patsy didn’t want to press charges, she said she fell against her car, and she let Gavin back in the house.

So that didn’t work, either.

My father went to talk to Gavin, who used to work in construction but now seemed to laze about their house, now and then doing odd jobs around the island. He told Gavin he knew he was beating Patsy and it had to stop. He told Gavin he would regret hurting Patsy. Gavin was scared of my father, who was tall and had a steely gaze, but it didn’t stop him.

The bruises kept coming.

My father bought Patsy a gun. They later learned that Gavin found it, though Patsy had hidden it in the back of her underwear drawer, which showed that Gavin was going through her things. Gavin was “hellfire furious at you,” she told my father, weeping. “He says he’s going to beat you up.”

My father laughed.

Finally, desperate, I told Patsy what I had seen for her future when I was at her house after school playing warrior princesses with Emily, even though my parents told me I should never tell anyone on the island about my premonitions.

“Miss Patsy,” I said in a whisper, even though Gavin wasn’t home, “Gavin is going to kill you. You’re going to get in a fight and he’s going to push you hard and you’re going to crack your head open on your kitchen floor and die.”

She looked alarmed, shocked, then she said, “Stop it, Evie. You’re like your parents. I get it. You don’t like Gavin. But I love him, he loves me. He’s got a temper, but he can be kind and he treats me like a princess. I can change him. Love can change him. He’ll change, you’ll see. He had a hard childhood.” She knitted her hands together. The hands that made such unique, colorful art. Her pottery sold right off the shelves at Island Pottery, my mother told me, “as soon as she can make it, it’s gone. Patsy has such talent.”

“You aren’t a princess,” I whispered to Patsy, so scared. “He’s going to kill you unless you tell him to get out of your house, and then Emily is not going to have a mom.”

“I can’t believe you’re talking like this, Evie. Like you can see the future when you can’t.”