“You said you didn’t grow up in the kind of house where magical thinking was encouraged,” Thomas recalls. “That your life was pretty regimented.”

“Maybe . . . maybe when I lost time, wrote on my skin? Maybe that was the start of my abilities and what Mom, what she did to me, taught me to cram my gift down.”

“Have you ever asked Hana what you said and wrote that freaked her out?”

I shake my head. “In fairness, until last night all I remembered was wetting the bed, those showers, and my apologies.” Thomas rests his head back on the pillow. This close I can smell the slight musk of the hotel shampoo and the clean scent of shaving cream.

“When you left home, the fugue states, for lack of a better word, started again?”

“Yeah. The first I can recall was when I spoke with that pregnant woman, Bethany.”

“And the panic attack?”

“When I went up to my parents’ bathroom and saw the shower where Mom used to scrub my skin, had the vision, I got dizzy, took a seat, reached out to grip the bathroom door. My nail gouged a paint bubble and a scab tore free. Beneath the white paint, the door was red.”

Thomas is quiet for a few moments then admits, “I don’t understand.”

“The door I open to the other side is the exact same as my parents’ bathroom door.”

THIRTY-TWO

Thomas

I want to tell Sylvie that she’s not damaged from whatever happened to her before High River, and after she arrived. That she has an inexplicable gift. There have been moments over the past few days I was starting to believe it, but given what I now know about her past, repressed memories, the red bathroom door, it seems more likely that she’s both a talented mentalist, extremely intuitive, but also suffers from some sort of early psychological wound.

“Thomas?”

In this vulnerable moment I can’t bear to wound her, so I tell her my whole truth. “My big brother was killed that night with my dad. Deacan was only fifteen. He wanted to be a journalist.” I rarely share this and each word drops like a stone.

“Sorry doesn’t seem like a big enough word, but I am, so sorry, for your loss.” Sylvie says. “Could Deacan have been . . . Could he be the younger spirit that came through during your reading? The one with the journal?”

Sylvie’s eyes are silver moons. I could lose myself in their glow, enter a mystical world where talking to my dead father and brother is possible. But the laws of nature overwhelm my desire. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

“It was my idea to get dessert the night my dad and brother died. Mom said no. Dad was the pushover. He worked long hours, traveled, tried hard to make it up to Deacan and me. My brother and I played rock-paper-scissors to see who would go with him to pick the flavor. Deacan won.”