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“Knight of Swords changes everything,” Piper quipped. “I’m starting to think there might be something to this tarot card stuff. Serious, Chanti, because of your warning about the car, I didn’t indulge in the cocktails at lunch. If I’d let myself get a little numb and buzzy, things with the van could have gone badly.”

“They did go badly,” she whispered.

“Or if I went into the river, I’d probably have succumbed to hypothermia.”

Chanti stared at her for a long minute, then started crying.

Softy at first, and then with a lot of energy, just the way Piper had done on the boat.

Piper reached for Chanti and their hands gripped while emotions shook their systems.

It had been close.

So close.

Tarot card warnings and a good dog. Or dead.

Or worse.

Piper didn’t even know what bullet she’d dodged by not landing in the van.

As their emotions settled, Chanti said, “Good thing you didn’t drink. And, in the end, you got a guy and a trophy,” Chanti said, climbing off the bed to get the box of tissues for both of them. “And this explains my dream last night.”

“Yeah? What did you dream about?” Piper asked.

“I was getting ready for a huge crowd, and I decided to make a big pot of French onion soup.” She climbed back onto the bed. “So I spent the entire night thin-slicing onions and crying until my eyes swelled shut. So from this story today, we have a crowd of river spectators, and we have tears.”

“You dream a lot about food,” Piper said, grabbing a tissue from the box Chanti held out. “My dream last night should have been my warning to call in sick. The award, by the way, was ugly and they spelled my name wrong.”

“Rude.”

“No worries,” Piper said, then blew her nose loudly. “The van people have it.” She lifted her hands, then let them drop. “They have my purse, my keys, everything. This is going to be so much work.”

“When your phone sent me the distress notice, I cut off all your credit cards and notified the bank.”

“Perfect. Thank you.” Piper pulled another tissue from the box.

“The dream?” Chanti asked.

“It’s been a low-frequency vibe since I talked to Vivian this morning.”

Chanti lifted her knees and wrapped her arms around her legs. “Let’s hear it.”

“There was this man baby, and it was mine to take care of.”

“Ah, Wade. That’s his name, right?”

“From the picnic? Yes. In this dream? Possibly? I hadn’t thought of that. The baby seemed very familiar, but it wasn’t my baby, and there was a problem. The baby had a problem with the amalgams in the back of his teeth. It was up to me to get it fixed, so I was trying to figure out what to do. These four dentist-like people showed up in the driveway, and they said, “We know how to fix the problem.’ One of them was a dental hygienist, and she said, ‘I took an X-ray, and I can see that these are bad amalgams. We need to fix it.”

Chanti looked like she was struggling to form the images in her imagination. “Okay.”

“In my dream, I was wondering why four dentist people had shown up in my driveway. It was very weird. I realized that I was being scammed. I waited for the man-baby’s dental information to upload, but I had an old dial-up kind of computer. And I said to the woman, ‘I know you can’t just look at people’s dental information. She said, ‘I’m not that kind of person. I’m not here to scam you.’ Big emphasis on the you. But I still had this niggling feeling that something bad was happening. Why would they come to my house like they were being magnanimous?”

“Helping the man-baby.”

“Right?” Piper asked.

“Okay,” Chanti said, “how did it end?”