My mother and aunts had filled three scrapbooks with photos of me as a baby, toddler, kindergartener, teenager, and beyond. There were even about twenty photos they’d taken of me in the last year. They wrapped them up and presented them to my new family.

Betsy hugged those photograph books close to herself, as if she would not let them go, ever, tears streaming down her face, Johnny’s arms wrapped around her.

* * *

Johnny, Betsy, Kayla, Tilly, and I hiked around the bucolic blue lake at the campground on Saturday. I later introduced them to all my animals. The goats escaped again, and they agreed my goats were naughty. They loved Sundance and marveled at how well he could run on three legs. Butch and Cassidy were happy to have new friends, the lambs lined up, and Shakespeare and Jane Austen said a gracious hello. The cats were shy. We went out for Mexican food that night in town. We rode the ferry to Lopozzo Island for ice cream together. We laughed, we talked, we hugged. I felt comfortable with all of them immediately. I felt as if I could be myself. I felt that mysterious hole closing in my heart.

Betsy and I had time to talk alone, sitting on our beach, and we talked about her time in jail, the trials, the grocery stores, her eternal hope that she would meet me one day. We talked about our premonitions, what it was like to live with them. Everything I had felt, she felt.

To me, seeing into the future, seeing people get mangled and hurt and run over and crushed and killed and sick is a living nightmare. Trying to intervene, or choosing not to intervene, is relentlessly exhausting.

“You’ve saved people, Evie,” Betsy said, her hand in mine, as natural as if we’d been holding hands our whole lives. “Never forget that.”

That was true.

“When I’m working at the market and all of the sudden I get a vision of what may happen to a customer on her way home, a car crash, perhaps, and I have to drop everything, leave a meeting, and go and help, it’s tough. But that one person, she’s okay. She’s saved. To them it’s worth it, isn’t it? So to us, it has to be, too.”

It is definitely worth it to them.

“The images are sometimes so bad, I feel kicked in the face,” Betsy said. “But that kick in the face makes me do something. It makes me reach out to others. I accept that for some reason the women in our line can choose to save. My mother said no to it and wasted her life. I said yes, you say yes, Kayla says yes. Is there an option to say no? Yes, there is. But then you would be someone you are not, honey. You would be someone you wouldn’t like or respect.”