“I figured out pretty damn quick to shut my mouth about what I could do, and it wasn’t hard to hide. Basically, I just had parlor tricks at that point, nothing that got in the way of life, but that changed when I was eleven and I started to pull that on-my-ass babbling crap. That was a big problem. It happened whenever and wherever it wanted to. I had no control over it, and instead of growing out of it, like I did all that manipulation and small-scale clairvoyance stuff, it got worse and worse.”

“You were gifted,” she said, with no small amount of awe.

He looked over his shoulder. Most of the color had come back into her face, which was more than he would have hoped for, but he did not agree with her assessment.

“Cursed was the way I saw it.” He went back to staring out at the lines of tiny cars far, far below. “As I grew up, I got bigger and tougher, so getting harassed was less of an issue, but the episodes didn’t stop, and I was getting more and more frustrated by feeling like a freak. Finally, I decided I had to talk to someone, so I went to this psychic downtown. I felt like a total fucking fool, but I was desperate. She helped me, told me what to do, and even though I didn’t believe in it, I went home and did what she said…and everything changed.”

“You stopped getting the seizures?”

“Yeah.”

“So why are they back now?”

“I don’t know.” And he didn’t know why they’d started, either.

“Vin?” When he glanced back at her, she patted the bed. “Come and sit down. Please.”

After he searched her face and saw nothing but warmth and empathy, he went over and lowered his ass on the mattress beside her. As he braced his fists on the duvet and leaned into his shoulders, her hand landed lightly on his back and she rubbed him in a slow circle.

He drew incredible reserves of strength from her touch.

“After the seizures stopped, everything was different. And in a totally unrelated weirdness, my parents died accidentally soon thereafter—which really was not a total surprise, because as violent as they were with each other, it was only a matter of time. As soon as they were gone, I dropped out of school and went to work for my dad’s boss as a plumbing assistant. I’d turned eighteen by then, so I was legal to work in the trade and I made it my business to learn everything. Which was how I ended up on the contracting side of things. I never took a vacation. I never looked back, and ever since then, life has been…”

Funny, up until a couple of days ago he’d have said great. “Life has been really good-looking from the outside, since then.”