Page 19 of The Fate Factor

She shrugs. “Three years of law school. But I’m serious. Your hair is so long and I’m loving the color.”

I run a hand through it, pulling at a tangle. It’s past my shoulders now and an unintentional ombre. The top three-quarters, or maybe a year of growth, is back to my natural near-black, having had zero time to get the warm highlights touched up. I wonder if Jamie would have recognized me so easily if I’d still had them.

I don’t have time to catch up on my balayage right now, though. Important cosmic questions need answering.

I pull Kate through the wooden screen door, letting it bang with athwackbehind us. “Look at this place.” She kicks off her shoes on the mat in the kitchen and spins around the cottage. “It’s exactly the same.”

“Some of it,” I say, digging through the kitchen drawers. Pixie makes herself known with a stretch and strut, and Kate picks her up. “The property management company put a gingham-lined basket of lobster-shaped soaps in the bathroom.”

Nana never had a cohesive design for this place, but she was fervently anti-kitsch.

“Gross,” Kate says plainly, making me laugh even though internally I’m on a ledge, tipping forward with every second I spend not talking this out.

This has always been Kate’s superpower, pulling me back from a spiral. Whenever I felt myself getting nervous about something as a kid, meeting someone new or straying too far from the safety circle I’d built myself, she’d remind me that my biggest leap was probably a tiny step for most people.

And just like that, the whole thing would snap into perspective.

I need a little of that right now—perspective—because I’m starting to feel like an unwitting character in a movie.

I find the lighter I was looking for in a drawer, and start flinging open cabinets. Nana’s turquoise stone bowl sits on the top shelf, and I pause, torn between wanting to make sure I do this little ritual right, and the anxiety I feel about holding that bowl in particular. Like the white pillar candles Nana insisted on, the ones tucked in the top of her bedroom closet, she only ever used this bowl to catch the wax. I’ve already decided I’m not going into her room to get the candles, so in the name of quality control, I stretch to my toes to pull the bowl down. I should use at least one of her props.

“So tell me how you spent your first night back,” Kate says unaware of my existential angst. She lifts a jar candle from the island to sniff it, and I snatch it from her. I line it up on the island with the lighter and the bowl, now filled with water, and shove my thumbnail between my teeth.

Kate watches me warily. “What the hell is going on?”

“I need to try something.”

“Okaaay.”

“Something…weirdhappened last night.”

“Oh my God.” Her eyebrows jump to her hair. “Did Nana, like, visit you?”

“Really, that’s where your head goes? Ghosts?” Though, it’s pretty bold of me to scoff at the supernatural considering what I’m about to do.

She shrugs. “She was always so mystical. If anyone could come back, it would be her.”

I nod in agreement because Kate always finds a way to bring me around to her side of ridiculousness. Though, I didn’t need her help to get to this place, did I? The place where I’m about to reenact that night on the roof in hopes of… well, I don’t know what I’m hoping for. The possibility of being assaulted byanother hallucination is less than comforting, but if I can make it happen with someone other than Jamie, that removes one complication.

Discovering some latent psychic ability is one thing. But a cosmic link to a stranger, especially one that ends the way my vision on the roof did, is more than I have the capacity for at the moment.

Lighting the candle, I wave my hand over the wick a few times to get a good flame. Kate has seen this enough times that understanding clicks on her face. She sets Pixie down and reaches across the island to press her palm to my forehead. “Babe, are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”I’m not. “But I need to put an end to something right now.”

“With Nana’s candle thing?”

“Yes. Just let me!”

She holds her hands up at the pitch in my voice. “Fine. If we’re doing this, lottery numbers would be great.”

Ignoring that, I lift the candle while the wax turns liquid. I’ve seen Nana do this a hundred times, on this very kitchen island, but I’ve only done it myself as a joke. I don’t know the finer details of the ritual. For good measure, I grab Kate’s wrist the way Jamie grabbed mine that night. I’m desperate to find the key to this thing and Nana’s not around to ask. Is it the candle? The candle and the touching? The candle and touchinghim?

The wax is pooling, so I take a deep breath and slowly tip it into the water. The moments before it congeals feel like eternity, but when it finally takes form, I realize I don’t have any idea what I’m looking for. That night with Jamie, it wasn’t the wax at all. The pictures just… formed in my head. But right now, the only thing knocking around in my brain is a nagging question regarding my sanity.

Defeated, I shove the bowl away, water sloshing over the edge, and drop my face into my hands.

“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” Kate grabs a dish towel and mops the mess I’ve made.

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