“I’ve showed.” He glanced around, but people were emptying out of the parking lot, and the school itself, as fast as possible. Usually Mateo did the same. If you wanted to be left totally alone, hanging around Rodman after 3:30 p.m. was a good way to go. The only person who seemed to be paying them any attention was Ms. Walsh—but after a glance in their direction, she slipped into her car to drive away. “Sorry for freaking out.”

Nadia shrugged. “No worries. The news was pretty freak-worthy.”

The wind played with her shining black hair; she could look so casual discussing this, a literal matter of life and death. But it wasn’t that she didn’t take it seriously—Mateo could tell that much. It was more that Nadia could handle it. There was a center to her—a purpose, a definition—that Mateo had almost never sensed in anyone else. It drew him as strongly and inexorably as gravity pulled them to the earth.

Nadia continued their lunch conversation as if they’d never broken it off. “Like you said—yeah, I’ve already been in town long enough to hear about the family curse. I’m afraid curses are very real. Witches aren’t ever supposed to cast them, but it can happen. If your family has been cursed for generations, then a very powerful witch laid this down long ago. Can you tell me more about how it works? I know it’s supposed to lead to insanity, but there could be lots of reasons why.”

Mateo straightened. Nobody had ever given him a chance to explain. “We start seeing the future. Or, up until recently, I thought it was that people believed they saw the future and that was the first sign they were losing it. But—I’ve been having dreams, and they’ve started coming true.”

“Oh, this is unbelievable,” Verlaine breathed, but she wasn’t trying to move away from him. She only wanted to hear his side of the story. She wasn’t so bad, really. “This is not good news. Nadia was explaining this just last night! Seeing the future makes people go loco.”

“Tell me about it.” Mateo’s mother had rowed out to sea so she could drown. His grandfather had died in the house fire he himself had started, the one that had scarred Grandma for life. His great-grandmother committed suicide in City Hall with a shotgun. So it went—on and on, further and further back—a string of suicides, homicides, and self-destructive behavior that had marked at least one Cabot in every generation all the way back to their arrival in the New World when Rhode Island was still a colony. They’d all gone crazy—because each and every one had seen the future, just like him.

“You dream of the future. Okay.” Nadia still seemed totally calm. “What are your dreams?”

Mateo couldn’t speak at first. I’ve seen you lying dead in my arms.

But he couldn’t say that to her. Not yet and maybe not ever.

So he went for the simplest thing first. “The night of the wreck? I dreamed about your family’s car going into that ditch. That’s why I was there. I had to see if the dream would come true, and it did. I knew I’d have to pull you out.”