“Let’s have the soup, dear,” she told me, her voice constricted. “Perhaps I need to eat.”

“Okay.” I ladled up the soup, turned off the stove, grabbed the spinach salad and our French bread out of the oven, and sat down.

“Mom,” I said quietly, carefully, “Are you sick? What’s wrong?”

“I’m fine.”

“Mom, please, I know something’s wrong.”

She put her hand on my arm, but her hand shook as if there were a live wire in it, and I covered it with my own. “I’m fine, sweetheart. Read the rest of the article. It will . . . I want . . . I think . . . it will distract me from this.” She waved a hand in the air.

“Are you sure? Okay.” I picked up my phone. My concern for my mother was sky-high. There was something wrong and she wouldn’t tell me. I was trying not to force it out of her, but I was close to it.

I read to her the case about Johnny Kandinsky and Betsy Baturra. “Do you remember that case?”

“Yes, I do. Quite well.” She was pale.

“Mom, please eat,” I said. “You—”

“Let’s hear the rest of the article.” Her voice was firm. I don’t argue with my mother when she uses that firm voice.

I read the rest of the article to my mother: The couple was released from prison because Tilly Kandinsky remembered what happened the day of the murder, and blew open the investigation of her father, a serial killer.

“How odd,” I said. “Betsy predicted things during the trial that would happen to the judge and the jurors, and they did, which helped her case in saying she had premonitions about Peter Kandinsky and how she had foreseen he was going to kill Johnny.” I stopped reading. Wow. There was someone else out there who had premonitions, just like me. She wasn’t a fraud, she wasn’t trying to steal people’s money. “They tried to get their daughter back after they were released. They went to court. They had attorneys. But the courts said no. Even though their convictions were overturned, the courts said their daughter, named Rose, could not be returned to them. They found in favor of the adopted parents and that it would be too traumatic to make the girl move.”

My mother sat very still.

“It was a difficult case,” my mother said.

I looked at her, and I could feel my brow furrowing. “A difficult case? How so?”

“Well, the woman, Betsy, said she had premonitions, and I didn’t believe her.”

“But you believe me.”

“I know, dear, but she was trying to use it as her defense. No one believed her, that’s why she was in jail. They thought she was delusional, and a liar.”