And we would ask my mom, and she was so relieved to see him, so happy to have him home, I could tell even then, as a young child, that she would bake us a cake. White chocolate coconut cake. Hummingbird cake. Dark chocolate candy cane. We would eat cake, drink tea, and read books together.

“I always appreciated how you and Dad tried to help me with my premonitions and how you tried to help other people. You two taught me how to change the timing so that the premonition would pass them by, and I loved you for it. I don’t know if I ever told you that, but thanks, Mom.”

“Of course, honey.” She gave me a hug. My mom always hugs me. “We wanted to help them, but mostly we wanted to help you. From a young age, we had to have the most serious of conversations with you about what to say, what not to say, when to act, when not to.” She shook her head and wiped the sweat off her brow with her purple garden glove. “I was discussing ethics and morals with a five-year-old.”

“The worst was when I had premonitions about Dad. Remember that time I saw an explosion behind him and he kept walking over a bunch of rocks, as if he hadn’t heard it? And he wasn’t in his military clothes.”

“I remember that when you told your dad, his face went grim.”

“He asked me a lot of questions, and I told him what he was wearing and what I saw.”

“You saw him in a desert. You said you saw him by buildings made of sand and you saw guns. ‘Guns as long as jump ropes,’ you told him.”

“Another time I told him I saw an explosion in a tower and I saw a whole bunch of jeeps with guns on the back. I cried and cried, and Dad held me. Then he asked me specific questions, and I told him that he was going to run behind a black truck and get straight down on his stomach and the truck was going to get hit by a bomb and he was going away on a stretcher on a helicopter with a lot of blood.”

“That premonition saved your father’s life.”

“It did?” I was stunned. Sundance leaned against me. He likes to be close. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because you were nine years old. We didn’t want to scare you. But your father never forgot it. That incident played out in the Middle East. He actually saw a black truck and he made sure that he, and the other men he was with, did not go behind it. The black truck was blown to smithereens.”

I sat with that one shocking story for a while.

“Dad didn’t want you to know because it would have been so upsetting.”