I didn’t do much of anything after that. I didn’t go back to school. I didn’t do homework. I didn’t talk to my friends. I barely ate, and I hardly slept. I just stayed in my room at Grandma Frost’s house and cried.

And cried and cried and cried some more.

Grandma did everything she could to make me feel better. She cooked me special meals and baked me special desserts and held me when I cried. She told me over and over again that it wasn’t my fault, that it was just a quirk of the gods, a cruel twist of fate that even she hadn’t seen coming with all her psychic powers. Gods or not, fate or not, nothing she said changed my mind.

My mom’s death was my fault—and all the guilt and blame were mine to bear.

Alone. Forever.

One morning, about three weeks after my mom’s funeral, a knock sounded on the front door.

It was early and cold for May, so cold that a layer of frost had coated everything outside with a thin sheet of silver ice. The knock sounded again, but I was too busy staring out my bedroom window at nothing in particular to answer it. Besides, it was probably just one of my grandma’s clients, come to get their fortune told. Grandma Frost had started seeing people again this week, saying that she needed to keep busy, that she needed to do something besides sit around and think about the fact that her daughter was dead. She’d tried to get me to do the same—to do something, anything, to take my mind off things.

Grandma was hurting, too, so I did my best to please her. For starters, I helped Grandma box up everything in my old house and move it over to hers, since I was living with her now. I fixed up my room just the way I wanted it, watched TV, and pretended to read my comic books, although I couldn’t remember what happened from one colorful page to the next. And when I cried, I did so in my room late at night, where Grandma wouldn’t see or hear me, even though I knew she was doing the same thing in her room down the hall.

But nothing I did eased the ache in my heart—or helped me deal with my guilt over my mom’s death.

“Gwen!” Grandma Frost called out several minutes later. “Come downstairs, please!”

So it wasn’t one of her clients after all. Otherwise, Grandma would have been busy telling the person her fortune by now. I sighed, wiped the latest round of tears off my face, and plodded down to the kitchen.

To my surprise, two people sat at the kitchen table—Grandma Frost and the woman she was drinking tea with.

The woman lifted the blue, snowflake-covered teacup to her lips and took a small, precise sip. Then she put the cup back down, positioning it on the table just so, before looking at me. She was short, with a body that looked stocky and strong inside her black pantsuit and white shirt. Her black hair was pulled back into a bun, and her eyes were a soft green behind her silver glasses.