Chapter 1 — The Drive to the Funeral Home

The drive to the funeral home was the longest of my life.

The morning was gray and bitter, and even with the heater roaring, the air inside the car had gone cold in a way no thermostat could explain.

Veronica, my seven-year-old granddaughter, sat very still in the passenger seat.

She has always had a strange sensitivity — an ability to feel things the rest of us can’t, to know when a room has turned before anyone has said a word.

For seven years it had been a small, private oddness in our family, a thing we half-joked about.

That morning, it terrified me.

I should say plainly that I am not, by nature, a woman who believes in such things.

Thirty years in emergency medicine will burn most of the mysticism out of a person; I have watched too many families reach for signs and comfort at the exact moment I was reading a monitor that told a colder truth.

I dealt in what could be measured.

And so for most of Veronica’s life I had gently, privately explained her gift to myself as a bright, sensitive child picking up on cues the adults missed — reading faces, sensing tension, the ordinary intuition of a watchful little girl, dressed up by a family that liked a good story.

That was the explanation I could live with.

It let me keep both my granddaughter and my skepticism.

But there is a difference between a child who senses a mood and a child who clutches her own throat in a moving car and gasps out that her murdered mother is in the back seat trying to speak — and on that gray morning, driving to bury my daughter, I felt the comfortable explanation crack under me like ice on a pond in spring.

Whatever Veronica had, it was not a party trick, and it was not ordinary intuition, and it had just told me something I did not want to be true.

That was why it terrified me.

Not because I didn’t believe her.

Because, sitting in that stopped car with my heart going like a hammer, I found that I did.