Violet thought about that. It wasn’t quite what she’d expected to hear. For some reason, she’d always thought she was supposed to keep her secret close to her, guard it.

“Did Grandma ever tell anyone?” She was suddenly curious about how the others who’d come before her had handled this inherited ability. She knew that her grandmother, at least, had shared the same talent.

Her mom’s eyebrows rose, and then she laughed. “Your grandmother told everyone who would listen and some who wouldn’t. She once told me that when she was a little girl her teacher made her go home for telling stories about finding dead animals. Of course, your grandmother never found a human body.” She reached out to stroke her daughter’s cheek.

“So why do you think that you didn’t . . . you know, get . . . it?”

Her mom shrugged, a playful smile tugging at her lips. “Just my bad luck, I guess.”

“Whatever,” Violet muttered, scoffing at the idea that somehow she’d been blessed by good fortune to be able to locate the discarded prey of others. But then she thought about her bizarre afternoon at the FBI offices. “So would you tell anyone, if you were me?”

Her mom got up from the table, clearing away the dishes. “I would think about why I was doing it, if there was a purpose in someone else knowing, and then do whatever my heart told me was right,” her mom answered as she dumped the dishes into the sink. She winked at Violet. “I know one thing, sweetheart. I know without a doubt that you’ll make the right decision, whatever you choose to do.”

And then she walked out of the kitchen, leaving Violet with more questions than before. Somehow she’d expected her mother to confirm what she’d always believed: that it was a secret. And that it should remain that way.

Instead her head reeled with new possibilities. About telling someone new. About helping the FBI. About purposefully tracking down killers.

It was a lot for one girl to consider. And for now, at least, it was a task she was too physically and emotionally depleted to worry about.

She turned out the lights as she made her way up to her room.

As tired as she was, Violet didn’t go to sleep right away. Instead she lay on her bed, stretched out on her stomach, looking at the files Sara had asked Rafe to give her.

She knew what Sara expected, of course, what she thought Violet could do with a stack of photographs and police reports. She thought Violet was some kind of psychic. Sara thought Violet would be able to solve mysteries simply by running her hands over the evidence they’d gathered.

If only it were that simple.

Violet reached for one of the two files, the one from the little boy’s case. She glanced inside at a photograph of his face. She ran her fingertip over the picture, tracing the line of his sweet little mouth, wondering how someone could harm a child. Violet felt a dark stab of sorrow deep in her chest. He was so young, so innocent.

She closed the folder and opened the other one instead.

Inside was a photo of a woman. According to the file, her name was Serena Russo—Mike’s mom. The picture wasn’t current; even two years ago it would have been dated, as if it were pulled from a frame that had been hanging in the family home. It was faded, and the clothing was long out of style, but in it she was smiling. She’d been happy when the picture was taken.

There were two other photos in the folder, both from crimes older than Serena Russo’s disappearance. Both taken after her first husband had abused her. In them, her face was bruised, her eyes swollen, her lips bloodied.

Violet turned over the pictures of the injured woman, unable to look for too long.

Goose bumps raked her skin as she glanced at the mug shot of the man responsible. She looked at his name: Roger Hartman. She glanced casually at his address and was startled to see that it was only an hour away from where she lived.

Violet could understand why Sara believed that this man might be responsible for the woman’s disappearance, and she wondered what it was that Sara really suspected. Did she think that Mike’s mother was dead? That she’d been murdered by her abusive ex-husband?

It seemed unfair that he should be allowed to go on as if nothing had changed, when the Russo family had been torn apart.

Suddenly, Violet was sorry that she couldn’t help, sorry she wasn’t able to do something to ease the emptiness that Mike and his sister must feel in the wake of their mother’s absence. To lighten the burden that their father must bear without his wife.

The not knowing, as Sara had described it.

She closed the file and shoved them both into her backpack.

Violet wished she could help, wished she could do something to give Mike’s family a little closure of their own.

Gluttony

She hated the clinking sound of a bottle. It was never a good sound, especially in the dead of night.

It was the sound of her father.

Alone, in the darkness of her bedroom, she wanted to scream. She felt as if she would choke on the voice she held inside as her throat ached to set it free.

She listened as his heavy work boots shuffled across the floorboards of the living room, wondering for the millionth time why it had been her mother who’d left instead of him. Why couldn’t he have been the one to abandon his family?

Almost worse than the sound of the bottle, though, was the dread that swelled within her during those moments before he came home from work each night, as she waited to see which man he’d be, which father would walk through the door at the end of the day. Because she was convinced now that they were not one and the same, her old father and this new man who filled a place in their house. Her real father had gone—along with her mother—leaving her with this new man, who only in appearance resembled the father he once was.