It was not a curse and it was not a party trick.

It was love, working in a register most of us have gone deaf to.

Veronica did not sense her mother because she was strange.

She sensed her mother because she loved her, fiercely and without any of the walls the rest of us build, and because Tessa loved her back the same way, and love that pure does not always respect the line we draw between the living and the gone.

What came through Veronica that morning was not a ghost story.