“Maybe not much, but you chose well. I thought you’d been to Ireland.”

“No, I haven’t. Why did you think that?”

“The painting I bought. I know the place, or one very like it, not far from home. So, where is your forest?”

She’d dreamed it. She often dreamed her paintings. “It’s not real. I imagined it.”

“The same way you imagined me, and Riley, and the others we’ve yet to meet?”

“Lay it out, Sasha,” Riley advised. “The guy’s an Irish magician. He’s not going to bolt over a little strange.”

“I dreamed it.” She blurted it out like a confession. “All of it. All of you. I dreamed of Corfu—or I finally figured out it was Corfu, so I came. And I walked out onto the terrace of the hotel, and saw Riley. Then you.”

“In dreams.” He drank some wine, watched her with those dark, hooded eyes. “You’re a seer. Are your visions only when you sleep?”

“No.” It struck her that he didn’t react—nor had Riley—as others usually did. With skepticism, smirks, or with giddy questions about their own futures. “They come when they want to.”

“Bloody inconvenient.”

She let out a quick laugh. “Yeah. Bloody inconvenient. They’ll come here, the other three. I know that now. Or maybe they’re already here. But they’ll find us, or we’ll find them. Once that happens, I don’t know if there’s any going back.”

“To what?” Bran wondered.

“To our lives, to the way they were before.”

“If that’s what’s put the worry in your eyes, it’s always better going forward than back.”

She said nothing while the waiter served the starters. “You both want to find these stars, and your reasons probably matter, but all I know is something wants us to find them or we wouldn’t be here. But something else doesn’t want us to have them. That something is dark and dangerous and powerful. It may not be a matter of going forward or back, but of not existing at all.”

“Nobody lives forever.” So saying, Riley dug into her eggplant starter.

Bran brushed a hand over Sasha’s, lightly. “No one can make you do what you don’t want to do. It’s your choice, fáidh, to go forward or back.”

“What does that mean—what you called me?”

“What you are. Vision-seer, prophet.”

“Seems to me a prophet should see things more clearly.”

“I’ll wager others with your gift have thought the same.”

“If I go back, I don’t think I’ll ever find peace again.” While that was true enough, she knew a deeper truth. She couldn’t walk away from him. “So it looks like forward. I’ve never had dinner with two people who just accept what I am. It’s good.”

She sampled the dish Riley had called tzatziki, found the smooth yogurt, the bite of garlic, the cool tang of cucumber went down easily after all.

“And so’s this.”

The food settled her. Maybe it was the wine, or the fragrant night, or the fact that she’d finally fully accepted her decision, but the raw edges of her nerves quieted.