Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
The eggs were burning and I didn’t care because I was busy proving to myself that last night hadn’t happened.
I stood at Aunt Amelia’s ancient stove, spatula in hand, watching the edges of the fried egg go from golden to brown to something approaching charcoal.
The kitchen smelled like burnt butter and denial.
Outside, November sunlight filtered through the window over the sink, making the dust motes look almost pretty.
A normal morning. A completely normal morning in which nothing supernatural had occurred.
“You imagined it,” I said out loud, because apparently talking to myself was fine but seeing dead people was where I drew the line. “Stress hallucination. Hormones. Maybe the Cheerios were expired.”
I scraped the ruined egg onto a plate, stared at it, and scraped it into the trash.
My appetite had packed its bags and left sometime around three a.m., when I’d woken up drenched in sweat and immediately checked every mirror in the house.
All empty. Just my own tired face looking back at me, puffy-eyed and unconvinced.
The cottage felt too quiet. I’d left the TV on all night for company, some home renovation show where couples argued about backsplashes, but I’d turned it off when I realized I was jealous of people whose biggest problem was subway tile versus herringbone.
I needed to get out. I needed to do something aggressively normal, something so mundane it would overwrite whatever had happened in that bathroom. Grocery shopping. That was it. I’d go buy milk and vegetables like a functioning adult, and by the time I got back, my brain would have reset itself.
I grabbed my coat, my keys, and the reusable bags I kept forgetting to bring, and headed for the door. The hallway mirror caught my reflection as I passed. I flinched, then forced myself to look.
Just me. Dark hair with its silver streaks, the ones I’d stopped bothering to dye. Brown eyes, a little bloodshot. No dead Italian women offering unsolicited beauty advice.
“See?” I told my reflection. “Normal.”
My reflection did not look convinced.
The little grocery store on Main Street was called Harbor Market, and it had the kind of narrow aisles where you couldn’t avoid making eye contact with everyone you passed.
I’d been in Starfall Bay for three months and I still didn’t know most people, which suited me fine.
Back in my old life, I’d known everyone at the supermarket, the dry cleaner’s, the school pickup line.
I’d smiled until my face ached. Here, I could be anonymous.
Here, nobody knew I was the woman who’d supposedly killed her mother-in-law with a divorce announcement.
I was squeezing avocados—badly, I’d never been good at picking produce, Sal had always done the shopping because he said I bought things that were “past their potential,” which in retrospect was probably a metaphor—when the warmth started creeping up my neck.
Not dramatic. Not cinematic. Just that slow, unwelcome climb from normal body temperature to why is it so warm in here, the kind that made me want to unzip my jacket and stand in front of the frozen foods section until someone called management.
My face flushed. The back of my neck went damp.
I set the avocado down and tugged at my collar, breathing through it the way my doctor had suggested, which was about as effective as breathing through a building collapse.
The fluorescent lights above the lettuce display flickered. Once, twice. The mister that kept the greens damp sputtered and went off-schedule, spraying a fine mist directly into my face.
“Oh, come on,” I muttered, wiping water from my eyes.
And then I heard her.
“The avocados on the left are better. You always pick the wrong ones.”
I spun around. An older man in a fishing vest gave me a startled look and wheeled his cart in the opposite direction. No one else was nearby. No silver-haired ghost critiquing my fruit selection.
But the voice had been right there. Right in my ear.
For just a second, half a second, I could’ve sworn I saw a shape reflected in the chrome side of the produce scale. A woman. Pearls.
Then it was gone, and I was just a sweaty middle-aged woman clutching an avocado in a grocery store, trying very hard not to cry.
So much for aggressively normal.
“You’re Amelia’s niece, aren’t you?”
The voice came from behind me, and I almost dropped the avocado.
I turned to find a round woman with steel-gray hair and reading glasses perched on her nose, studying me the way a doctor studies an Xray.
She wore a cardigan with pockets deep enough to smuggle paperbacks, and her shoes were the sensible kind that said she’d long ago stopped caring what anyone thought about her footwear.
“I—yes.” I swiped at my damp forehead with the back of my hand. “Sorry, do I know you?”
“Not yet.” She tilted her head, those sharp blue eyes taking inventory of something I couldn’t see. “I’m Lori Marchetti. I was a friend of your aunt’s.” She paused, and something softened in her face. “Sit down, honey. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I laughed.
It came out wrong—too loud, too high, with a hysterical edge that made the man in the fishing vest look back over his shoulder from the canned goods aisle.
I pressed my hand over my mouth, but the laughter kept coming, shaking my shoulders, building in my chest until my eyes were watering and I had to lean against the avocado bin for support.
“Oh gosh,” I managed between gasps. “That’s—you have no idea how—“
Lori didn’t move. Didn’t look alarmed, didn’t back away, didn’t do any of the things a normal person does when a stranger starts laughing like a lunatic in the produce section. She just waited, arms crossed, head still tilted.
“Mm-hmm,” she said, when I’d finally gotten myself under control. “That’s about what I expected.”
I wiped my eyes. “What?”
“The hot flashes. The flickering lights. The general look of a woman who didn’t sleep last night because something she can’t explain happened and she’s not sure if she’s losing her mind.” Lori pulled a packet of tissues from one of those cavernous pockets and held it out to me. “Am I warm?”
My mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
“How did you—“
“Because I looked exactly like you twenty years ago. Stood right in this store, as a matter of fact, trying to buy chicken thighs while my hands were shaking so bad I could barely hold the package.” She tucked the tissues back when I didn’t take them.
“Your aunt called me that night. Said I’d figure it out eventually but a little guidance wouldn’t hurt. ”
I stared at her. The grocery store hummed around us—the rattle of a cart wheel, a Fleetwood Mac song on the overhead speakers, the mister going off on schedule this time.
Normal sounds. Normal world. And this woman standing in front of me talking like she knew exactly what had happened in my bathroom.
“I don’t—“ I started.
“You don’t have to say it here.” Lori glanced at the fishing vest man, who was pretending to read the label on a can of clam chowder while clearly eavesdropping. “There’s a coffee shop on Birch Street. Decent espresso, bad scones, nobody listens to anybody else’s conversations. My treat.”
Every reasonable part of me said to decline. To go home, close the curtains, and continue my perfectly reasonable plan of pretending nothing was wrong.
But the avocado in my hand was the one from the left side of the bin. The side Rosaria’s voice had recommended. And it felt perfect—firm with just the right give under my thumb.
I put it in my cart.
“Lead the way,” I said.
The coffee shop was called The Cracked Mug, which I appreciated for its honesty. We ordered cappuccinos and sat at a corner table near the window, and she let me blow on my coffee and fidget with the sugar packets for a full minute before she spoke.
"So. Who'd you see?"
I tore the corner off a sugar packet. Poured it in. Stirred. Tore another one.
"My dead mother-in-law."
"In a mirror?"
I stopped stirring. "How did you know that?"
"Mirrors are the easiest pathway. Especially for beginners." Lori sipped her cappuccino like we were discussing the weather. "Your aunt used them too. That's why she had so many. Different mirrors, different connections."
The collection of antique mirrors in the spare bedroom. The ones covered with sheets.
"Okay." I set the spoon down carefully. "I need you to explain what's happening to me, because right now I'm about sixty-forty on stress hallucinations versus brain tumor and I'd really love a third option."
Lori folded her hands on the table. She had a no-nonsense quality that reminded me of the head nurse at the hospital where I'd had Carmen—the kind of woman who'd tell you to breathe, and you'd breathe, because she clearly wasn't going to put up with any alternative.
"Third option: you're a medium. You can see and communicate with the dead. The ability runs in families, and it frequently activates during major hormonal shifts. Puberty sometimes. Pregnancy, occasionally." She paused. "Menopause, more often than you'd think."
I picked up the sugar packet again, then put it down when I realized I'd already emptied it.
"That's insane."
"That's Starfall Bay." Lori leaned back in her chair.
"This town has always been a thin spot. Something about the geography—the way the bay curves, the mineral deposits in the rock.
The barrier between the living and the dead is thinner here.
Always has been. People with latent abilities, they come here and those abilities wake up.
The hormonal changes just—speed things along. "
"My aunt." I said it quietly. "She was really—"
"A medium. A strong one. She helped a lot of people in this town, and she helped a lot of people like you.
Women whose gifts came on late, who thought they were going crazy.
" Lori's voice gentled, just slightly. "She would've been the one sitting across from you right now if she were still here. I'm a poor substitute, but I'll do."
My throat tightened. Aunt Amelia. I'd visited her cottage as a kid—long weekends in the summer, the smell of the ocean and those herbs in her kitchen. She'd been warm and strange and she'd always looked at me like she was waiting for something. I'd thought she was just eccentric.
"What about you?" I asked. "You said you looked like me twenty years ago."
"I'm a healer. Different gift, same trigger.
Hit menopause at forty-seven and suddenly I could feel other people's pain like it was my own.
Nearly lost my mind before Amelia found me.
" She smiled—brief, practical, like even her smiles had a job to do.
"I was a nurse for thirty years. Thought I was imagining things.
Overworked, overtired. Amelia sat me down, same as I'm doing with you, and told me the truth. "
"And what, you just—believed her?"
"Not at first. Took about a week. Then I healed a woman's migraine by touching her shoulder and something in me just—knew." She fixed me with those blue eyes. "You already know too, Gina. You wouldn't be sitting here if you didn't."
I wrapped both hands around my coffee cup. The ceramic was warm and solid and real, and I held onto that.
She wasn't wrong. That was becoming a theme—people telling me uncomfortable truths I couldn't argue with.
First Rosaria, now this retired nurse with her sensible shoes and her pockets full of tissues.
I wanted to say it was crazy. I wanted to finish my coffee and go home and chalk this up to a weird morning.
But I'd heard Rosaria's voice in the grocery store. I'd seen her in the produce scale. And the avocado she'd told me to pick was sitting in a bag at my feet, and it was the best avocado I'd ever chosen in my life.
"I don't know how to do this," I said. "Whatever this is. I don't know how to be a—" The word stuck. "I can barely figure out how to work the thermostat in that cottage."
Lori reached across the table and squeezed my wrist. Her hand was warm, and for just a second, the tension headache I'd been carrying since three a.m. eased. Just a fraction. Just enough to notice.
"You don't have to figure it out alone. That's the whole point.
" She released my wrist and picked up her cappuccino.
"Come to Bayberry House tomorrow night. Eight o'clock.
Tammy Logan's place—you've probably driven past it, big Victorian with the wraparound porch. There are others like you. Like us."
"Others." I blinked. "How many others?"
"Enough to fill a back room." Lori smiled again, warmer this time. "We'll help you figure out the thermostat too, if you need it."
I sat with that for a moment. The coffee shop buzzed quietly around us. A barista called out someone's name. Outside, a woman walked past with a golden retriever, both of them moving with the easy rhythm of a town where nothing terrible was supposed to happen.
Except something terrible had happened. Rosaria had been murdered. And according to her, I was the only one who could do anything about it.
And now, apparently, there was a support group.
"Tomorrow at eight," I said.
"Don't be late. Tammy locks the back door at eight-fifteen and she means it."
I finished my coffee. It was good—strong, a little bitter, nothing like the watered-down decaf I'd been drinking for years because Sal said caffeine made me jittery. I ordered a second one for the road, and Lori watched me with an expression I couldn't quite read. Approval, maybe. Or recognition.
Walking home, grocery bag in one hand and coffee in the other, I passed three antique shops. Every single one had crystals in the window. I'd thought it was a tourist gimmick. Now I wondered.
The cottage was cold when I got back. I put the groceries away, set the avocado on the counter where I could see it, and stood in the kitchen looking at Aunt Amelia's dried herbs and her shelves of books I'd been pretending were decoration.
I wasn't pretending anymore. I didn't know what I was doing, exactly, but pretending wasn't it.
From somewhere in the house—the bathroom, probably, because she had a flair for the dramatic—Rosaria's voice drifted toward me, faint but unmistakable:
"It took you long enough. And you bought the wrong coffee. I do not know why I expected otherwise."
I closed my eyes, counted to five, and started unpacking.