Every once in a while, I'd read a story in the newspaper about a family that lost a child in an accident, or of someone suffering unbearable grief after losing a spouse, and take the time to find their e-mail address. I'd introduce myself and offer my services, and usually a few days would pass before I'd receive a reply. Everyone to whom I reached out accepted my offer in the end, and I'd drive out to meet them, sometimes with Henry, and pass along messages from the recently departed. Usually the spirits would just want me to convey the abundant love they hadn't had chance to express before their unexpected death, or to assure their loved ones that they didn't suffer when they passed. One woman's recently deceased husband provided her with information about a secret bank account he'd opened in Switzerland that she could access. In another instance, the spirit of a woman's dead son told me where he'd hidden her mother's day gift in the garage, and she was beside herself with emotion when she found it exactly where I assured her she would.

My hobby was something I didn't discuss with friends, but Cheryl was aware of it. She'd surprised everyone in town by joining the police force after high school, and she called upon me from time to time for help in solving cases involving missing kids across Shawano County. Although I'd always figured Cheryl for a Brainiac in high school who'd end up studying some advanced science at an Ivy League school, she was a great cop. It was her caring nature, I figured. Cheryl had a persistent compulsion to make everything in the world right.

I never charged money for my services as a medium. After working with a psychic I'd met through Laura to better understand when spirits were trying to communicate with me, and gaining more insight into the methods they used to express ideas, I considered it an obligation to help people when I could with my ability. It gave me an inexpressibly huge feeling of comfort to bring closure to people who were so painfully grieving. Often, I wished that I could bring the same sense of closure to my mom, but I kept my services a secret from both of my parents. As far as I could tell, Jennie never reached out to me again after the trip to Michigan during my junior year of high school. I didn't want to give my mom false hope that I could deliver messages from Jennie when I was pretty sure that my twin was in peace on the other side and didn't want to be disturbed.

Henry and I moved to Madison after we'd both graduated. He took a year off after undergraduate studies to clerk at a law firm, and then entered law school just like he'd always planned. It took me a while in college to figure out what I really wanted to do with my life, flipping between majors almost every semester. My father scolded me about wasting time and money, especially because I could have gone to school in Florida at the university where he taught for free, but I didn't feel like I was wasting either. I'd been accepted to the University of Wisconsin with a generous scholarship after winning an essay contest on the topic of perseverance, and the truth was that I was so happy to be alive and in college like a normal kid that I was in no hurry to graduate and move on with my life.

Ultimately, I settled on veterinary studies because through my work with Brian, my psychic mentor, I realized that I had sympathetic communication abilities with animals in addition to dead people. I couldn't very well tell my dad how gratifying it was for me to hear from someone's sick pet what was wrong with them, or to provide dogs and cats with comfort on their way to the spirit world. He never came right out and said it, but I knew he considered my decision to go to veterinary school as a form of betrayal because he saw it as my following in Glenn's footsteps.

Mom and Glenn relocated to a modern condominium in Ortonville that looked kind of like a gingerbread house. While I knew it was hard for my mom to close the chapter of her life that had unfolded on Martha Road, the time was right. She and Glenn never married, but they seemed very happy together whenever I visited. They took in a high school foreign exchange student named Wei from Taiwan, and adored him so much that they encouraged him to apply for college at the University of Wisconsin in Sheboygan. He did, and remained with them for the four years of his undergraduate studies.

Mischa and I kept in close contact, although after she and Matt married and she had their daughter, Lindsay, our phone calls became less frequent. Despite the abrupt interruption in her gymnastics training the spring of our junior year of high school, she did eventually make the U.S.A. Olympic team, and brought home a silver medal, which hung in a display case at the entrance of the Weeping Willow library. She kept me up to date on the lives of kids with whom I'd attended school in Weeping Willow, and nagged me often about when Henry and I would start a family. I didn't dare tell her that we'd been working on that for a while, but for whatever reason, it just didn't seem to be in the stars for us.

We never spoke of Trey Emory. Shortly after high school graduation, Mischa mentioned that she'd heard Violet Simmons had been accepted at Duke. The Simmons mansion was purchased by a development firm, razed, and a luxury golf course was built on the property, surrounded by a subdivision of townhouses. Rather ironically, it met the same fate that Ann Simmons' old adversary Arthur Fitzpatrick probably would have wanted for it. It occurred to me a few times to look Violet up online out of curiosity just to find out if she'd ever succumbed to the rare genetic disease her father had claimed she'd suffered from, but I never could bring myself to type her name into the search field. Nothing good could come from knowing her whereabouts or how her life had turned out.

Trey's mother had successfully inherited half of the Simmons fortune, although it had taken several years after his death for all of the legal paperwork to be sorted out. By the time she got her hands on the money she'd desired for so long, Mrs. Emory had already paid tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees. She also successfully sued the Northern Reserve Academy for negligence after the Shawano County coroner confirmed Trey's cause of death to have been internal bleeding from an assault that they'd tried to cover up. For weeks I followed coverage of the case in The Willow Gazette out of a truly unhealthy obsession, and Mary Jane had been able to convince the jury that despite being in an incredible amount of pain for almost ten days, Trey had survived his injury for that long out of sheer determination.

The dark years of my childhood only returned to me in my sleep. When I woke up from vivid dreams about the freshly mowed front lawns of Martha Road, about fires consuming one-story ranch houses and the silhouettes of little girls in front windows, about beautiful boys in moonlit backyards opening cans of cat food for strays who'd just had kittens, and of dangerously pretty blue-eyed girls wearing lockets, I calmed myself down and reminded myself that I was in the present, in Madison, with Henry. I was safe. But the smell of fires in fireplaces, the rich orange and red shades of leaves in autumn, and the laughter of teenage girls I'd sometimes overhear when walking around in town always brought me back to Weeping Willow, the town where I'd grown up, the town where the bones of my twin sister, my true love, and the friends I couldn't save were buried and would remain forever.

THE END