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“I never said I was a medium,” she says as a breeze kicks a cloud of shimmering dust over the lake.
“Please, Maeve.”
She pulls a bag of gummy bears out of her back pocket and pops a red one into her mouth. “I can put out the call for his energy, but whether he comes is out of my control. I don’t want you to get your hopes up too high.”
“He came to you before, though?” I press.
“Yes,” she draws out the word, as if there’s more she’s not saying.
A butterfly lands on her shoulder; its wings flutter against her cheek.
The same flutter materializes in my chest, only it’s a thousand butterfly wings. “Please. Tell me.”
She squeezes her eyes shut and blows out a reluctant breath. Her free hand touches the empty space at the hollow of her throat. “The night I met Tessa. I don’t know whether she realized how powerfully her energy was calling for him.”
Heat blooms across my entire body at the sound of my sister’s name, and it takes everything inside me to barricade the wave of emotion. “Did Brandon ... was there a message for me?”
My breath stalls in my lungs.
“I got the sense that he wanted you to find what you lost. Something that has always been meant for you, though it’s been missing for too long. Something that, when you find, will lead you to what you seek.”
The edges of my vision blur. Everything in my body goes silent, as if I’m suspended in time. My hand mimics hers and touches the empty space where the locket Brandon gave me should be. It’s been lost since the accident.
“My locket? Could that be ...”
Maeve’s silence feels like an answer. She eats more gummy bears, and a pattern is emerging. Red, yellow, green.
After all this time, I assumed it was gone for good. Impossible to find.
But maybe no more impossible than flowers that bloom in moonlight and birds with broken hearts.
“It’s worth a try, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know where to look.” My voice is a whisper.
“As they always say, where there’s a will, there’s a way.”
14
WILL
For maybe the hundredth time, I type some version ofMaeveandmediuminto my web browser and come up with exactly nothing. As far as the internet goes, Maeve does not exist.
Though, how that’s possible is a mystery. Because she looms large in real life. It’s impossible to get a cup of coffee without hearing a Maeve story. She has something. I can see why people are drawn to her. A lot of celebrities I’ve met have that same energy. But—ticket sales for bad movies notwithstanding—they don’t inspire fans to give up fistfuls of cash and jewelry.
I blow out a breath and open Facebook. I’ve avoided social media since my show was canceled—the diminishing number of friends and followers is a reminder of the direction my career is going—but desperate times call for desperate measures.
The cliché makes me think of Hope, and my fingers scroll to her page, as if they’ve got a mind of their own. Her profile picture is of her and a handsome man who I vaguely recognize from high school—Brandon. Their faces are smooshed together, matching mile-wide smiles reaching all the way to their eyes. Brandon is a head taller than Hope, with sandy-brown hair and a jawline my agent would drool over. He’s good looking in a boy next door way that matches Hope’s gentle spark.
The last album she posted was two months before Brandon died. Photos of Brandon and Hope posing with aSOLDsign in front of a modest house and making faces into the camera populate the screen. Farther down her page, her wedding album. Their joy in every photo is almost audible through the phone.
Something inside me breaks for Hope—to have had that happiness and lost it ...
No.Hope made it clear she doesn’t want my pity.
My mother’s page is more current than Hope’s, but not much. A photo of Lake Kingsette at sunset, taken just before she disappeared, sits at the top of her timeline. I recognize the tree line a second before I see the two figures in the far-left corner of the photo. They’re blurry and half-concealed by a shadow. I zoom in, and their faces become more pixelated. One of the figures is Maeve—silver hair and all.
The next series of photos is in black and white, with an intentional pop of color. A photo of Bailey, her pink hair highlighted among the shades of gray. A red rose in the monotone garden. A photo of Ashley and Vicky seated around the bonfire. It takes a moment to spot the pop of color.
