Murphy was the only person I still told my visions to, the only person who ever listened and gave a shit. But Murphy knew as well as I did that for each one of my visions that came true—each one that happened more or less how I’d foreseen it—I had another that fell way off the mark or flat-out didn’t make sense at all. That was just the way with visions, and it was a tricky business to count on them.

Murphy smiled at me a little sadly.

“Well, you’ve been right so far this time,” she said. “I might as well check.”

Murphy walked over to Horace’s car. She stuck the keys in the trunk and popped it.

“Please don’t,” I said. “It’s not worth it. Horace will kill us.”

“There’s something in here,” she said. “Look.”

I peeked over her shoulder as Murphy rummaged around the lining of the trunk, moving aside a bunch of clutter and a particularly heavy-looking tire iron, then lifted the cover off of a secret compartment. Inside were a bunch of manila file folders and a ziplock bag full of handwritten letters.

“I knew it,” she said.

Murphy went for the folders, and I snatched up the ziplock bag. I pulled one letter out of the bag and read.

Please just let me see them, Jenny. Please bring them to me just once. You know I can’t bear to leave the Farm. I can’t travel. I just want to see my grandchildren once before it’s too late.

Holy shit. These letters were from Grandma, and there must have been hundreds of them. Why didn’t Mom ever tell us about them? More importantly, why were they in Horace’s trunk? Was it because he was afraid we’d go snooping through Mom’s things after the funeral and find them? Was he trying to keep us from contacting our grandmother for some reason? I mean, I understood that she and Mom didn’t get along, but what did Horace have to do with it?

“Uhh, Lee?” said Murphy. “Look at this.”

She held up a stack of pages, and I read over her shoulder. It was a bunch of legal documents, all signed and notarized. Murphy flipped through them. They seemed to be adoption papers.

Our adoption papers.

“What the hell is this?” I said.

They didn’t have anything to do with Mom or our birth. They were newer than that, dated not more than a month ago. Murphy flipped to two typed, identical statements, one for each of us, that read, “I hereby consent to my formal, legal adoption by Horace Dunluth Powell III,” complete with our signatures. Forged, of course. There was no way in hell either one of us would ever consent to be adopted by that asshole.

“Oh my god,” she said. “Horace adopted us.”

“Why would he do that?” I said. “He hates us.”

“The trust from our grandmother,” she said.

The garage got quiet then, eerie. I wondered about all the bugs and spiders hidden in the corners of this place, tucked away in boxes, lingering there, silent and listening, waiting to hear what we would do next. It felt like the moment before one of my visions came, when the world went sharp and strange, when I felt the electricity of the whole earth in my fingertips.