Sutton didn’t take this dark gift for granted for a second. She knew that if she didn’t have the outlet, hadn’t found a way to channel her inner demons, she’d be mumbling to herself as she shuffled along the side of the road, hair in greasy hanks, clothes tattered, her feet rubbed raw from too-small shoes found at the local junk store, her life shortened by her brain turning to Swiss cheese inside her skull.

Happily, there was a pill for that. She took them religiously. She’d brought a year’s supply with her. She didn’t plan to stay away quite that long, only long enough to assuage some of the guilt and give her tired mind some room to relax. Time to get Ethan fully out of her system.

Goodbye, Ethan.

She had no doubt that if she hadn’t been cursed with all the extra mental goodness, the words would be gone, too. Would she be happier without them? Would she be normal? Would she have had a cadre of girlfriends and they’d have wine and cheese parties and girls’ weekends and send their men off to play golf and talk about periods and breastfeeding and the latest innovations in diapers and swill champagne by the bucket at book club meetings?

Would she want that from her life? She thought not. She thought—and it was one of those wonderful lightning flashes of epiphany, the kind that leave you slightly breathless and perfectly content—that no, she wouldn’t like a normal life at all, thank you very much.

Besides, how do you trade a gift—Sutton always felt her writing ability was a gift, dark as its biological genesis may be, no doubts there—for sanity and normality? How? Wasn’t it a slap in God’s face? He’d made her in his image. Did that mean God was suffering from some sort of mental disorder, as well?

Feeling mildly sacrilegious and quite pleased with that thought progression, which had taken less than ten seconds, exactly enough to take a single sip of her champagne and cross her legs, she gave Constantine Raffalo a genuine smile. He was pleasant to look at; his teeth were white and straight when he smiled. She often wondered if she could judge a person solely by their teeth. An inversely proportional ten to one scale. The straighter and whiter (a ten) they were, the lower on the scale of trustworthiness they went. Straight, white teeth meant money spent to make them that way. Money meant coming from a world she hadn’t been familiar with.

Her own teeth suffered from an odd dentition, the canines eagerly pushing forward so her front four teeth lay back, flat against her lips. It would only have taken a retainer to fix, but there was no money in her childhood household for such luxuries. Ethan’s crooked front tooth...