She hesitated before turning on the phone. Adrenaline mingled with exhaustion was still charging her senses. She should probably wait until morning to check her messages. But Mr. Jones might have decided to throw another job her way to make up for the Keegan fiasco. If she didn’t jump on the opportunity, he would offer the delivery to another agent.

She swallowed some of the wine, took a deep breath and turned on the phone. There were not a lot of messages. That was directly attributable to the fact that she did not have a lot of friends at the moment. Her former colleagues at Ecclestone’s had ghosted her in the wake of the scandal that had shaken the exclusive auction house to its foundations.

Someone had to take the fall for the fraudulent art and antiques that had been evaluated and authenticated by the experts in the house. The clients who had been scammed wanted blood. The firm’s reputation had been on the line. When rumors surfaced that the con artist was the new associate in the American Antiques Department, the CEO had leaped on the opportunity to throw Sierra under the bus. Julian Mather, the man she had been dating, was the first to disappear. The colleagues she had considered friends had vanished shortly thereafter.

Sierra told herself she understood. No one with a viable career in the world of fine arts and antiques could afford to maintain a relationship with someone who was rumored to deal in frauds and fakes. Reputation was everything. So, sure, she understood. Nevertheless, it hurt.

It didn’t help that losing the job had proven her parents right. Again. She was not cut out to live in the normal world, a world where those who claimed to have psychic talents were viewed with deep suspicion or, equally unsettling, a scary fascination. She had done her best to conceal her abilities during her tenure at Ecclestone’s, but the need to hide that part of herself was stressful, and it was a huge barrier when it came to establishing personal relationships. One of the quickest ways to lose a date, it turned out, was to tell him you could make him faint by using your psychic powers on him. A lot of people in the so-called normal world were not exactly open-minded when it came to the paranormal.

There was another issue that had made passing for normal difficult. She had been raised in what sociologists called an intentional community. Quest had been founded by an eclectic group of artists, misfits, neohippies, psychics—fake and real—and others seeking an alternate path. The thing about growing up in Quest was that none of her friends and neighbors had a problem with the concept of the paranormal.

That was because a number of residents, including her parents and grandparents, had come from Fogg Lake, the rural town deep in the mountains of Washington State that had the unique distinction of being a community in which psychic phenomena were accepted as normal. There was a reason for that attitude—in Fogg Lake, the paranormal was normal.