Chapter 5
“Water hands,” Ingrid murmured. “The sign of a highly intuitive, sensitive, and caring person.” Ingrid felt a squeeze—Sailor’s fingers curling up and tightening around hers. The woman’s eyes lifted. She was ill at ease.
Ingrid nodded. “Remember, you determine your life … your future. Always. I’m just here to offer encouragement. And maybe a bit of insight.”
Sailor let out a nervous breath along with a laugh. “Okay. Sorry.”
“No apologies necessary.” Ingrid gently spread her hand open again and let the hand, cool and narrow, lie in hers for a moment, attuning herself to the vibrations she felt. They were bold, strong. Thick.
Better to focus on what she saw in front of her, not the unsettling, out-of-place images that had first invaded her mind. What a bride-to-be needed was good news.
She traced the line that circled the pad of the thumb. “You have a shorter thumb, indicating you’re a bit more on the cautious side, as well as a shorter index finger. You like other people to take the credit, don’t you?”
Sailor let out a soft laugh, and Ingrid went through the rest of the fingers and then the palm.
“Your lifeline,” she murmured, running her nail along its length, “doesn’t tell you how long you’re going to live; that’s a misconception.
” She touched different points. “These are increments, or years of your life. Infancy, childhood, ten, twelve, your teenage years. Now here we have your teens, your twenties …”
Sailor’s eyes were fastened on her.
“Broken lines or islands represent an injury … and these intersections that come up from the thumb, those are your guardian angels. People who have died who now look after you from the spirit realm.”
Ingrid’s voice faltered. She sounded so clinical, like some kind of classroom instructor.
Not only that, but she’d suddenly started to feel a little dizzy.
Faint and blurry around the edges. The pleasant, trancelike hum that had settled her nerves earlier had stopped, and now she’d broken out in a sweat.
She refocused on Sailor’s palm, blinking her eyes a couple of times. “Right here? Did you have a loved one die around the age of eight? I mean, not them. You. When you were eight?”
Sailor shook her head. “My grandmother died when I was sixteen. And the rest of my grandparents are still alive. So I don’t know who that could be.”
“Oh, well.” Ingrid cleared her throat. “I see a bit of an island around that time, too. When you were eight. Did you experience some sort of injury or maybe a hospitalization at that time?”
Sailor cocked her head. “I don’t think so. I can’t remember any.” The light in her blue eyes had dimmed, and there was a set to her mouth and jaw, making her lips purse the slightest bit.
Ingrid might not be able to read Sailor’s palm worth a crap, but she could read her face with no problem. She’d been nice to Ingrid because she was that kind of person, but now the curtain across her eyes had closed. She was over this whole situation.
Ingrid’s mind shot out wildly in all directions: wedding, bridesmaids, Savannah, Turks and Caicos, the blue sea, as blue as her eyes, a boat bobbing over it, sails out, tipping to one side …
Shit.
That wasn’t helping one bit, letting her panic churn out a bunch of random nonsense.
In fact, it was making everything worse.
She was getting more and more flustered.
And time was ticking by—shit, shit, shit—while nothing was being said.
All she had to fill was fifteen minutes, fifteen stupid minutes, and even that had turned into an eternity …
Edie, she thought desperately. Edie, I need you!
Sailor had, ever so tactfully, started to pull her hand back, but Ingrid tightened her grip. Sailor looked up, a hint of alarm in her eyes—and then Ingrid felt a clean, sharp light fill her, like the blast of a nuclear bomb.
A memory of Edie, one early spring day. Tess had only recently dropped Ingrid off, and she was still feeling shy around her grandmother.
At the top of every hour, when the old clock on the parlor mantel chimed, Edie had led Ingrid around the house, to the spots where the brightest block of sunlight shone on the floor.
From the stair landing to the kitchen, to the front hall and the back bedroom, they followed the sun’s movement across the Savannah sky.
In each instance, the two would stand together in the light, hands clasped, while Edie did a ritual. Not from any book, but one that Ingrid realized later Edie had learned from her own grandmother:
Gather strength,
As the clock waxes.
Gather courage,
As the day wanes.
I gather, you gather,
And what we gather shall grow,
So in the bloom of night, we shine forth.
Now Ingrid sat straighter, the memory of that light bringing a sharp certainty. She inhaled and looked Sailor dead in the eyes.
“Your mother won’t ruin the wedding,” she said.
The words had propelled their way from someplace inside her, in a way that she knew she hadn’t drummed up the thought or premeditated it in any way. And she felt that rush she sometimes got—that singular, unmistakable high she felt when she knew she’d tuned into the right frequency.
Across from her, Sailor looked startled, her eyes gone wide and alert, her body rigid in the chair.
Go, go, go, Ingrid told herself. It was the same thing she chanted on the beach in April when she wanted to run into the cold Atlantic surf. Don’t think. Don’t hesitate. Just dive in. DIVE IN!
“Your mother is a problem, but not an unfixable one,” she said.
Sailor’s face sharpened into focus. Tears filmed her eyes making them shine. Her mouth opened.
“Your father’s the tough one. The one who won’t listen, but he loves you.
He won’t do anything to ruin your day. But he’s not the one …
” Ingrid saw the drooping of Sailor’s shoulders, the way her eyebrows had knitted together then raised.
“It’s your brother you worry about, isn’t it?
The path is laid out for him, but he’s still so lost.”
Sailor sat back, her eyes fastened on Ingrid.
And now Ingrid was seeing more.
Empty rooms.
A gathering in an office …
Fire …
The middle C hum had started up again, louder now, a singular note that banished everything else from her brain.
Incense wafted through the hum. A whiff of Edie’s perfume.
Ingrid thought of the four elements represented on her altar—earth, air, fire, water.
She saw them swirling together, a holy assembly of the natural order.
She opened her mouth to speak again, but …
there … she could feel Edie in the room.
Raised eyebrow over warm brown eyes. A cluck of the tongue.
A gentle warning. Edie had always taught her that predicting the future with too much specificity was presumptuous.
Their job was to interpret, not prophesy.
Ingrid closed her mind’s eye to her dead grandmother’s face and focused on Sailor. “He loves you, the man you’re going to marry.”
Sailor sat motionless.
“Ballast,” Ingrid said. “You’re his ballast.”
A moment of utter silence. Utter stillness.
And then, “How did you know that’s what he calls me?” Sailor whispered.
Ingrid shook her head.
“He says it’s because I keep him steady,” Sailor said.
“You keep a lot of people steady, don’t you?” Ingrid leaned forward. “You keep your father’s business humming. Even though he doesn’t see it. You … you’re a marketing … type of person, right? Promotions? Partnerships? But a leader at heart.”
“How did you …” Sailor started to say, then shook her head with a smile. “Sorry. I guess that’s your job. I mean, it’s amazing. Actually, I can’t believe you just said all that.”
Ingrid smiled back at her. She didn’t know where that word had come from, except … Miles, working up on the roof, had said it, earlier, hadn’t he? That might’ve been why it was in her short-term memory, but she knew it was more than that. Much more. She had connected with Edie.
Now, instead of the disdain, disbelief, and disgust she’d seen earlier today in those boys’ eyes … that she realized she’d been expecting to see in Sailor Loeffler’s eyes … she saw something else entirely.
She saw trust.