I glance around at flashlights probing the distant night. I look back at the jeweled vehicle lights flowing along John F. Kennedy Street, and up at the steady traffic on the bridge. I survey the growing number of police cars parked everywhere. No one is inside them. I don’t notice a single person near enough to eavesdrop.

But I don’t doubt that Lucy feels the breath of the enemy on the back of her neck, and nothing I say is going to change that appreciably. It’s like people who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. You’ll never convince them there’s nothing to feel anxious about. You won’t talk them out of their nightmares and phobias. It won’t help to wish them happy thoughts and sweet dreams.

Lucy’s early passions, triumphs, disasters and flirtations are part of her programming. Most indelibly etched are her Quantico experiences, what truly were the very best and worst times of her young adult life. With my blessing and under my direction she took a road less traveled and slammed head-on into a monster. Their collision was cataclysmic and I never saw it coming. Lucy’s not the same, and neither am I. No one would be.

Psychic injuries can become faults that like disk errors and other glitches aren’t always fixable. It’s disturbing to contemplate how often my niece’s hair-trigger responses aren’t warranted by what she’s convinced she perceives. Most of the time I don’t say much. I wait for her to have clarity, and she doesn’t seem to have that as often anymore. It’s gotten increasingly difficult to be sure what to trust. What’s real? What isn’t? Even Lucy doesn’t always seem to know, and if I could wipe the monstrous psychopath Carrie Grethen off the face of the earth it would be for that alone.

She’s managed to rob my de facto daughter of any peace of mind she might have had in this life, and I can’t seem to do much about it. God knows I’ve tried. God knows how much I regret the damage that’s been done. Were I really Lucy’s mother, I’d be a failed one. She’s the most important thing I should have gotten right.

I won’t forgive Carrie Grethen for that either, and it’s moments like this when I recognize how much I want her eradicated. Completely and forever. Like a plague. Like a scourge.

“All right.” I go along with Lucy’s request in a noncommittal way, revealing nothing important on the off chance we’re not alone. “We’ll duck out of the heat and grab a drink but we need to make it quick. As you’ve probably gathered, setting up is taking longer than I’d hoped.”

“Murphy’s Law.”

“Once we’re ready to go, I can’t stall.”