Page 3 of It Runs in the Family

I still had visions of a few of my trusted cousins to stop my spontaneous ones, but I was careful about who I asked. Rita had been on the rotation until she hooked up with her current boyfriend. I’d seen things that couldn’t be unseen and hadn’t been able to look at John Jacob the same since.

“Do you know where she is?” I asked.

“She ain’t here, that’s for damn sure. She met some new guy about a month ago and took off a couple of weeks later. I was about to kick her no-good, slobby ass out anyway. That girl’s like a Category Five hurricane.”

“Do you know who she went with?”

Rita let out a bitter laugh. “Girl, there ain’t no tellin’.”

“If you see her, will you tell her I need to talk to her ASAP?”

“Sure thing,” Rita said, and yawned hard enough I could hear it. “But hell might freeze over before I see her again. We didn’t part on good terms.”

That was an exaggeration. The first part, not the second. Rita would see Selena at our next Sunday family dinner. Our granny made attendance mandatory.

“I’m sorry I woke you,” I said, truly meaning it. I should have waited until the sun was up before I called. Especially since I knew Rita was having a hard time adjusting to motherhood. “How about tomorrow I come take the baby for the afternoon so you can get some sleep? To make up for waking you.”

“You’d do that?” Rita’s voice cracked. “Don’t be promising me sleep and then snatch it away.”

Now I really felt bad. Rita and I had been close until John Jacob started hanging around a couple of years ago. If he weren’t the baby’s daddy, I’d probably be helping her several days a week. Especially since I had experience with my older cousins’ babies.

“Which cousin do you think you’re talkin’ to, Rita?” I said dryly. In the cousin-dependability ranking, I was number two, right after Garrett. One of the reasons she’d asked if I was okay when she picked up. “Let me get a few hours of sleep after my shift, and then I’ll pick him up early afternoon.”

“God bless you, Iris.”

“See you later.”

I hung up and gave myself a couple of moments to mourn the loss of our old relationship. Then again, we still had one. It was just different. But that was the way of life. People had moved on from me my entire life. I was used to it. Mostly.

Tapping my finger on my phone, I forced myself to look at this logically. Would it be the worst thing if I didn’t find Selena? She’d witnessed my murder in the vision. If I avoided her, then logically, I wouldn’t be murdered. But that was selfishness talking. Selena was either in or about to put herself in a dangerous situation, and I couldn’t live with myself if anything happened to her.

Selena and I weren’t close now, but we had been when we were kids. Rita, Selena, and I had been as close as sisters. Selena was only a few months older than me, and she’d been my refuge from my mom and the drunks and drug addicts she brought home on a regular basis. For a few years, we lived next door to each other, and I’d slip out of my bedroom window and into Selena’s, crawling under her covers while she wrapped her arms around me and promised everything would be okay. That I would always be safe.

But something had happened to Selena our senior year of high school. I still didn’t know what, but I suspected she may have been sexually assaulted. She’d always denied it, so the only thing I knew for sure was that she’d changed. The happy, confident girl I loved disappeared. For a good year, she became withdrawn and refused to leave the house, no matter what I did to try to help her. When she finally did emerge, it was with tentative steps and without the joy she’d previously had in everything she did. She’d lived with me those two years, and I’d taken care of her, just like she’d taken care of me when no one else had.

Until she’d started dating again and let it consume her whole life.

She liked to think she used men, but from where I stood, it was mutual. She had a type most of us didn’t approve of—rough, irresponsible, aimless—but unlike the other people in our family who gave a shit, I never gave her a hard time about it. I only hoped she’d eventually find a good guy who’d break through to the loving, genuine girl I still saw underneath her brittle exterior. The girl I hoped would emerge again.

So, it came down to something simple: Selena was in trouble, and this time, I was going to save her.

Just like she’d saved me.

Chapter Two

I got off at seven, just as the sky was starting to lighten at the horizon, and headed home to get four hours of sleep. I was proud of myself when I got up on the second snooze, stumbling into the kitchen to start my coffee maker before I showered. I downed two cups of coffee while I got ready, then headed to Rita’s. As I left my apartment, I texted her I was on my way, so she’d have JJ’s diaper bag ready.

When I pulled up in the driveway, Rita was already standing behind the storm door of her seventy-plus-year-old brick ranch home holding JJ, looking like a woman waiting to get on the last Titanic lifeboat.

My guilt hit even harder.

Rita’s grandmother on her father’s side rented the house to her, and it hadn’t aged well. After the last hailstorm, the roof needed to be replaced, and the aluminum-framed windows were probably original to the house. Her grandmother refused to repair or replace either. The yard needed to be mowed, and the landscaping was overgrown. But to be fair, it looked a lot like the other houses in the neighborhood.

Rita was wearing a pair of loose shorts and a blue tank top. Her brunette hair was pulled back into a messy bun, with multiple stray hairs loose around her face. JJ was wearing a white onesie, and his back was against her chest, her arm tucked under his armpits. For once, he wasn’t crying.

Before I was out of the car, Rita was out the door, carrying the baby and a diaper bag slung over her shoulder.

“You’re not even gonna let me come in?” I teased.