The Bridesmaid's Gifts

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“Then you must think I am. Because there is no way I’m buying whatever it is you’re trying to sell.”

“I’m not trying to sell anything, Ethan. I just…know.”

“You don’t know anything.” He took the photograph out of her hands and set it a bit too forcefully back into place on Joel’s bookcase. “I think you’d better leave now.”

She sighed wearily. “I knew you would react this way.”

“Did you? Well, hell, maybe you are psychic.”

He stalked to the doorway, pausing there with one hand motioning for her to precede him. It wasn’t a request.

Though she moved past him out of the bedroom, she wasn’t ready to completely give up. “If you would just let me tell you what I—”

“I’m really not interested.” He kept walking, straight toward the front door, making her have to hurry to keep up with him. “I know Nic thinks the world of you, and Joel seems to like you, too, so I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt. Maybe you really believe the things you say. Maybe you’ve guessed correctly so many times that you’ve convinced yourself you really do have some sort of gift. But this time you’ve taken it too far.”

“Don’t you think I know how bizarre this sounds?” she retorted. “Can’t you understand how hard it was for me to come here, knowing how you would respond?”

“Then why did you come?”

She sighed and pushed her hands into her pockets. “I had to,” she muttered. “I couldn’t sleep last night and I knew I wouldn’t be able to rest until I talked to you about the…about the feeling I had about your brother.”

“And just when did you get this…feeling?”

The slight note of mockery behind the word wasn’t lost to her, but she answered evenly, “Last night. At the reception. When you touched me, I—I knew there was something I had to tell you. I wasn’t sure what it was until later, during the night, when I got…I don’t know…some sort of a mental image of this photograph. When I looked at it, when I held it, I knew what I had to tell you.”

Ethan’s expression didn’t change during her halting, stumbling explanation. She swung out her hands in frustration. “I know it sounds crazy! I spent most of the night wondering if I really have lost my mind. I don’t have visions, Ethan. I don’t get flashes when people touch me. Like you said, I make guesses—and they usually come true. But this is different. This isn’t something that has ever happened to me before.”

“Really?” He made no effort to hide his disbelief. “How about last year, when you kept calling Nic in Alabama to warn her that something bad was going to happen to her?”

“I told you—that was a feeling. Just a vague sense of uneasiness that made me worry something might go wrong. The sort of premonition ordinary people get all the time.”

Ordinary being the operative word. It was all she had ever aspired to be.

Ordinary.

Normal.

He shook his head. “Coming into my brother’s house, going into his bedroom, telling me Kyle didn’t drown thirty years ago—that’s not the sort of thing ordinary people do, Aislinn.”

She swallowed. “I know.”

Letting his breath escape in a long, slow exhale, Ethan pushed a hand through his hair, leaving it even more mussed than it had been before. “I’m not sure what I should say here. I’m not very good at this sort of thing. Maybe you should get some help. You know, see someone. If you need me to call anyone—a friend, maybe, a family member—just tell me the number.”

Oh, great. Now he was trying to be nice even as he suggested that she should be taken away in a straitjacket.

“You know what, Ethan? You’re right. I shouldn’t have come here,” she snapped, moving toward the door. “I should have known how you would react. I did know, but I thought I could persuade you to listen. I was wrong about that, but I wasn’t wrong about Kyle. He didn’t die in that flood. He’s very much alive.”

He didn’t respond, but she hadn’t really expected him to. She grabbed the doorknob and jerked open the door. She’d stepped only halfway through when she turned to throw one last reckless comment over her shoulder.

“You want a real, live prediction from a real, live freak? Fine. Your parents are on their way home. They’ll arrive just fine, but they’ll be delayed by several hours because they’re going to have a blowout in a little town just inside the Alabama border. The left rear tire, and it’s going to take them a while to have it repaired. So figure out how I ‘guessed’ that, why don’t you? I certainly don’t know.”

She slammed the door behind her with enough force to rattle the diamond-shaped glass pane in the center. And still it didn’t seem hard enough to express the full extent of her anguished frustration.

Ethan was trying his best to concentrate on his work when the telephone rang later that afternoon. Glancing at his watch, he decided it was exactly the time his parents should be arriving safely at their home, probably without any untimely delays at all. “Hello?”

“Hey, bro, it’s Joel.”

So he’d guessed wrong. “What are you doing calling on your honeymoon? You don’t have enough to keep you entertained there?”