She looks up at me. “Tonight might not be the right time, but there’s something I wanted to talk to you about. I’m not quite ready for you to leave. Not yet. So last night, after our fight, I called Bea’s mom for advice. She knows of a summer program for new high school graduates. It starts in Paris, but they’d take you to nearly a dozen other countries.”

Surprise plummets through me, but when I meet her eye, she looks like herself. Determined. Steady. “Really?” I ask cautiously.

“Really. Here, look.” She pulls up the website on her phone and hands it to me, and I watch the website’s revolving photos in shock for a moment. The Netherlands. Croatia. Poland. Switzerland. Bulgaria. The program is literally called “Find Your Place in the World: A Program for College Freshmen.”

“I’d love to send you to that,” she says. “It would be a good first step to traveling on your own. And it means I get to keep you for another year.”

My heart is overflowing now, and I’m not sure if it’s from the surprise or from her saying she wants me home for another year. “Mom, this is…” I take a deep breath. “I mean, obviously I’ll have to get accepted first, but it sounds perfect.”

“You’ll get accepted. And this program will be only the beginning for you.” She has a small smile on her face. “I never tell anyone this, but Daisy taught me to read palms. I saw your future a long time ago.”

Surprise sparkles through me. “Really? Are you serious?”

“Let me show you.”

I hold out my hand, and she cups it in hers, tracing her finger along the center of my palm. “This big line is your lifeline. Yours is extremely long, which reflects all of the energy and enthusiasm you have for life. That’s your Willowness.”

Willowness. I feel like I’m glowing from the inside out, tears prickling in my eyes again. “I really like that.”

She squeezes my hand slightly. “So does everybody else. Now, see these smaller ones at the bottom that intersect it? Those are your travel lines, and they’re the clearest, deepest travel lines I’ve ever seen. I could see them when you were barely a toddler. They surprised me so much. Those lines mean you’ll have lots of opportunities to travel, especially to places very far away from where you were born. They also mean you’ll have a lot of travel luck.”

My heart feels like it’s spiraling, bursting in a million different directions. My mouth hurts from smiling this big. “That’s really what it means?”