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“Jessica, sweetheart,” Webb says flatly. “You know I was only trying to help. I was a little heavy-handed in my encounter with you, but it was out of my control. Your thoughts just came to me, so strong, so violent. Still, please, accept my apologies.”
Jessica shrugs. “Thanks.”
“So, what brings you back here? You feel troubled. You feel…Hold on.” Her head tips down slightly and Jessica sees her blank gaze fall to her abdomen. “Are you pregnant?”
Jessica gulps, dryly. She should have guessed that Webb would pick up on that first thing. “Yes. I’m pregnant.”
“Is that why you’re here?”
“No, that’s not why I’m here. I’m here because…” Jessica wrestles with possible words.
The woman straightens slightly. “Someone broke you again?”
Jessica’s shoulders slump. “Yeah. I think so. And they took some memories, and the memories contain the key to the case I’m working on. It’s all in there, but it’s gone. Can you…?”
Webb breathes out loudly through her nose. “Who did this to you?”
“I don’t know. I was trying to rescue this kid, she’d been abducted, brainwashed, something like that, and I got her out of her bed and through her window…and then I wake up and become a different person for a whole day. Like, I was me, but I wasn’t me. I was me without all the…”
“Darkness.”
“Well, yeah. I guess. Darkness. Doubt. Awareness. Context.”
“Stripped of your humanity.”
“Stripped of my humanity…”
“And then?”
“An event broke through her hold. The police arrived and it broke the spell. I could suddenly see exactly what was happening and walk away from it.”
“And now?”
“Now I feel like someone took a huge handful out of my guts. Like there’s a hole inside me.”
The old psychic stares at Jessica, and it seems like she’s staring right through her.
“Yes. That’s what I suspect. I will need you to hand yourself over to me completely. Are you prepared to do that?”
Jessica stares at her. Webb violated her the last time she saw her, but now she is her only hope. Jessica wants to walk straight out of here, but she knows she can’t. Not while part of her is still missing.
“Yes,” she says, heavily. “Yes. I trust you.”
“Good,” says Cassandra. “Then we begin.”
Jessica sits on a chaise longue next to a tall window overlooking the Hudson. It’s so close to the part of Hell’s Kitchen she inhabits, but this high up, the drone of traffic disappears, and a soft atmospheric drumming takes hold. It’s an entirely different world from hers. In an apartment across the street, she sees a couple eating a late dinner, the glitter of wine being poured into glasses. When all this is over, she tells herself, that will be her. She will sit in a pleasant apartment drinking wine with a pleasant man, with a pleasant child tucked up in bed at the end of a pleasant day. She just needs to get through this. And then: no more. No more danger. No more fingers inside her head. She closes her eyes and concentrates on the old woman’s words.
“Jessica, try to keep your thoughts still for me. Imagine your thoughts as limbs and my mind as a knife doing very delicate work. Think, if you can, of the center of a flower. Or maybe the eyes of a cat.”
At the mention of the word cat, Jessica is immediately sent reeling back in her thoughts to Mr. Smith staring at her from outside Grace’s bedroom door, and she sets her thoughts now firmly on the image of Mr. Smith’s eyes, the ancient, rheumy whites, the melon pip pupils, the irises of green and gold.
“Good, Jessica…that is good. Now…I will tell you what I see.” She is silent for a moment and then sucks her breath in loudly between her discolored teeth.
“What? What can you see?” Jessica wriggles with impatience.
“Stay still, Jessica. Stay still. Okay…I am finding pieces of your lost memories, they are divided and scattered. These things will come to me in no order, please just stay with me…. You’ve been in a place that has a long history. Another country…England?”
“Yes. Well, that I could have told—”
