“Hold on. Clara. Who? Who do you mean? Actually, wait a second. We shouldn’t be talking about this here. Let’s go out into the hall.” I wasn’t supposed to leave the desk, but there was a spot just outside the glass windows where a potted palm could obscure a person, maybe two. If Emily saw me talking to Clara, how would I explain?

Clara reached for one of the plant leaves, started tearing it into strips. “I think each of these weird visions I’m having are visions of like … something they thought about before they died. I know. Okay, before you say anything. I know what that sounds like. It sounds insane. I feel insane. But the woman who left her bag—her name, by the way, is Victoria, and Julie Zale … I’m seeing things about them that I couldn’t possibly know. Intimate things. Things that would matter in the end. I don’t know what to do.” She had shredded the leaf into bits. Her voice kept breaking, as though she was going to cry.

“Okay. So tell me how I can help you. I don’t know what my role is supposed to be in all of this. I haven’t seen Peaches at all. Just tell me what you want me to do.”

“I’m worried about her, too. That she’s in trouble, too. I just wish there was a way to test the visions, to know if I could trust them, if they’re even real.”

“How would you do that?”

She took a big breath, sucking it in between her teeth. “I have an idea. You’re not going to like it, but I think it might work. So Julie Zale had a bad childhood when she was really young, before she came to live with her uncle, he told me. Both of her parents were all messed up. I keep seeing a bedroom, a really pretty room with a checked bedspread, pink and white, and all these white pillows at the top. If I were Julie Zale, and I had grown up in a really shitty home”—she paused to issue a sardonic little laugh—“all I would think about, all I would dream about, was being somewhere that felt safe, like that bedroom. Where you felt cared for and where you could count on everything always being the same.”

“That makes sense.”

“So the vision I’m having … we just need to talk to someone who can confirm it.”

“Someone like who?”

“Her aunt and uncle’s phone number is on that poster.”

The thought clicked into place, and I felt the resistance everywhere, in my hands, my feet, my spine. “Clara, no. My god. Absolutely not.”

“Listen, I know it’s weird, but it’s the only sure way to know.”

“Weird? It’s downright insane. Cruel. What about … like … contacting one of her friends? Someone she knows on Facebook?”