“I don’t want to pretend. I want to do it. Like you.”

“Here’s a secret.” Rose bent and pushed a dark curl behind Seanna’s ear to whisper. “Most of the time I do pretend.”

Seanna didn’t giggle the way most little girls would have, pleased to be told a scandalous secret. Instead, she said, “But you can really do it. You have the Sight.”

Rose’s smile fell away as she nodded gravely. “Yes, Seanna, I do. And do you want to know another secret?”

“No.” Seanna’s small face screwed up. “I don’t want your stupid secrets. I want the Sight.”

There had been, deep inside Rose, the urge to snap at Seanna. To tell her not to talk to her aunt that way, not to talk to anyone that way. When someone offers a secret, it’s a gift and an honor. You don’t spit on it.

Rose reflected maybe that was where they’d gone wrong with Seanna. In Cainsville, children were cherished and loved and, yes, sometimes coddled. The same went in her family. The Walshes might steal and con outsiders, but family was family, and no family was more precious than children. Instead, they’d tried gently to guide Seanna to better behavior.

That day long ago, Rose had just taken a deep breath, pushed aside her own temper, and said, in a firmer voice, “Well, you’re going to listen to this secret, because it’s an important one, Seanna. Gifts are curses, too. They give you something special, but that makes you different, and different isn’t always good. Even the gift itself isn’t always good. Do you know why I usually pretend with others? Sometimes it’s because the Sight won’t work. Other times it’s because what I see is bad, so I tell them something nicer while trying to help them avoid the bad thing. Does that make sense?”

Seanna scowled. “You just want the Sight all for yourself.”

That was all her niece heard. Embedded deep in that explanation was the word “no,” and it was all that mattered.

“I can’t give the Sight to you, Seanna. Either you have it or you don’t.”

Rose remembered her niece’s scowl again, and it brought to mind another face. A face she tried to forget. Bobby Sheehan. A boy who lived in the city and had family in Cainsville. A boy, she now realized, who’d been a changeling, taken from a dysfunctional fae blood family and placed into a normal one with Cainsville ties. A boy who always knew that he didn’t belong—a cuckoo in the nest of very ordinary sparrows.