That she would grow up haunted, flinching, split off from the ordinary safe world other children get to live in.

I watched her for signs of it the way I once watched monitors at a bedside, waiting for the number that would tell me the worst was coming.

But children, it turns out, are stronger and stranger than we give them credit for.

As the case closed and the danger passed and the visions stopped, what was left in Veronica was not the terror.

It was her mother — Tessa’s laugh, Tessa’s voice, the particular way Tessa had loved her.