“Are you okay?” Sylvie quietly asks.

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

Back in the room I sit down at the antique-style desk and put “Heidi Hiddleston” into Google. She retired in 2002, the same year Sylvie was adopted. Coincidence? I search the online Tillamook white pages and find only three Hiddlestons: Grier and Barr F. Hiddleston, Vernon and Charles P. Hiddleston, and H. Hiddleston. The latter lives at 10 Lattimore Lane. There’s a phone number. I dial and a woman answers on the second ring. Quickly, I hang up. Surprise has served us well so far. I put the address into Google Maps. “I’ve got Heidi’s address and she’s home. Ready?”

Sylvie watches me from the couch. Moose lies at her feet chewing a massive rawhide bone and Chris is curled in her lap, purring. It seems impossible that my cat had any more weight to lose, but she’s thinner. I trace the nick on my freshly shaven jaw. Being around Sylvie has thrown me off. That needs to stop. I also need to quit being such an ass. “I shouldn’t have cut you off.”

“Would you rather we wait to talk about Madison until after your exposé runs and my career is destroyed?” Sylvie calmly asks.

I fold my hands on the desk. “Go ahead and say what you need to say.”

“You seem to have already made up your mind.”

“Like I said when we met, agreeing to an interview, opening up your life means that your side of things will be represented in my article. And if you can prove you’re not a fraud, that will be in the story, too.”

She lifts one brow. “How’s it going so far?”

“The jury is out.” My answer surprises me. Is that true?

Sylvie shifts forward on the couch and asks, “I’m curious. What do you think about psychics throughout history that have predicted major world events?”

“Like who?”

“Nostradamus for a start. He predicted the Great Fire of London, the French Revolution, and the rise of Napoleon.”

I scoff, “Pretty hard to fact-check a French astrologer whose book was published in the 1500s.”

Sylvie tips her head, considers. “Okay, how about Jeane Dixon? She predicted that a Democrat would win the presidential election in 1960, and that he’d be assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963. That was John F. Kennedy.”

“You’re leaving out the fact that Jeane Dixon famously reversed some of her predictions, including JFK’s.”

Sylvie’s eyes gleam. “Maybe there was a journalist trying to destroy her career.”

Enjoying the light sparring, I admit, “Maybe. But there’s a reason the Jeane Dixon effect is named after her—it’s human nature that people publicize the correct predictions of psychics and forget about the false ones.” I rest my chin on folded knuckles and ask, “Do you know what the ‘law of truly large numbers’ is?”

“With a large enough sample, anything, even the outrageous, is likely to happen,” Sylvie replies.

“The Simpsons has predicted major world events in its thirty-year run—Super Bowl winners, 9/11, even Disney’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox. I don’t think Homer is psychic. I know that the show has brilliant writers.”