It was Rune. “About Tamalyn. I got to the General Store. Veda met me. She said Tamalyn was crying hysterically in the back room, so I headed there and handed her tissues. When I didn’t say anything, she started talking in between crying fits. She said she was a bad person. Not because she tried to hurt you, Elle, or because she loved Adam, but because she was jealous...of the baby.”

“Uh-oh.” Elle got a sinking feeling.

“She kept assuring me that she loves the baby, but everyone coos about the baby, and nobody even notices her unless she’s got a pimple the size of Everest on the end of her nose. Her term, by the way—the size of Everest.”

“Glad you didn’t make that up,” Adam said.

“Poor kid.” Elle really felt for Tamalyn. “She’s jealous, and she’s guilty.”

“That about covers it,” Rune agreed. “She’s mad because the baby calls her Tammy, so her family now calls her Tammy, and the kids at school heard it and started calling her that, especially when they realized she hated it.”

Adam began, “That’s no reason to—” and stopped when Elle glared at him. “That’s major.”

“When you’re sixteen, it is,” Elle told him.

“I said a few things, barely got into who I was and who I’d been and we could talk anytime, and her mother walked in.” Rune made it sound like doom.

Elle tensed. “Oh, hell.”

“Right. She came sweeping in with the baby on her hip. Tamalyn looked at me like I was scum.” Rune sighed. “She thought I had tattled on her to her mother. Then her mother said Angelica’s assistant had called, and she’d dumped work to get to the store, and what was wrong? Had someone hurt Tamalyn? I got a dirty look from Mom, too.”

Elle couldn’t help it. She laughed. At once she said, “I’m sorry, Rune, but you are...unique.”

“In a good way, right?” Rune wasn’t really checking. She didn’t care what anyone thought.

Adam made his contribution to the conversation. “You’re absolutely the most normal psychic I ever met.”

Elle poked him with her elbow. “Stop that!” To Rune she said, “What happened with her mother?”

“Tamalyn started crying again, crying hard, and the baby started crying, too, and her mother handed me the baby and put her arms around Tamalyn. Which was exactly the right thing to do. But the baby didn’t want me—and I’ve held her before, she likes me, she likes everybody. She wanted Tamalyn. I offered her to Tamalyn, and the baby flung herself into her big sister’s arms and wrapped her chubby arms around her neck and kissed her face and wiped her tears and hugged her and kept saying, ‘Tammy, don’t cry, don’t cry, Tammy.’”

“Ahhh.” Elle felt as choked up as Rune sounded.

Adam looked alarmed.