“That’s energy. It has to go somewhere.” Lori nodded at the candle. “Light it.”
I stared at the wick. Thought about heat. Thought about the thermostat metaphor. Thought about warmth and fire and?—
Nothing.
“Try harder,” Lori said.
I concentrated until my jaw ached. The candle sat there, cool and waxy and deeply unimpressed.
“Maybe picture something that makes you angry,” Tammy suggested.
I thought about Sal telling me I was “past my potential.” Josie’s nod—twenty-eight years, and I got a nod. Rosaria sayingdivorcelike it was a disease. Thirty years of someone else deciding who I got to be.
Something flared in my chest.
The candle didn’t light. But three feet to the left, a paper napkin burst into flame.
“Oh—“ Jill jumped back so hard her chair scraped.
“Now control it,” Lori said, calm as Sunday. “Put it out.”
I turned toward the napkin, panicking, and reached for whatever I’d just done, trying to reverse it, pull the heat back, smother it?—
The notebook next to the napkin caught fire.
“That’s the opposite of putting it out!” Jill shrieked, and her hands shot up involuntarily, and a glass of water launched off the bar like a guided missile. It missed the napkin by a solid two feet and hit Lori square in the chest.
Tammy was already moving. She grabbed a dish towel, threw it over the napkin and notebook, and pressed down hard while Jill apologized in a stream of corporate-adjacent panic—“Oh God, I’m so sorry, that was a completely involuntary response, I had no intention of—Lori, I am so, so?—“
Lori sat there, dripping, her cardigan soaked, water running off her reading glasses. She removed them, wiped them on the one dry patch of her sleeve, and put them back on.
“Well,” she said. “We know what your gift is.”
“I almost burned down your restaurant!”
Tammy lifted the dish towel. Two charred patches on the table, a blackened napkin, and a notebook that would never be the same. “You did burn my table. But that’s what coasters are for.”
“But you made fire.” Lori smiled. It was the smile of a woman who’d been soaked by telekinetic water and still considered the evening a success. “That’s a start.”
“I wasted thirty years,” I said. It came out before I could stop it. I’d been staring into my tea, thinking about the fire, about the dimmer switch, about all the energy I’d been swallowing sinceI was twenty-two years old. “I spent my entire adult life being quiet and small and pleasant, and now I’m fifty-two and I’m setting napkins on fire and seeing dead people and I don’t even know how to unlock my own front door half the time.”
Lori sipped her tea. “We can practice unlocking doors, if you want. Literally. There’s a trick with energy manipulation—directing heat into a lock mechanism, expanding the metal just enough to pop it. Useful skill.”
“That’s not what I?—“
“I know what you meant.” She set the mug down. “But I answered the part I can actually help with first. The other part, the thirty years—that’s harder.”
I wrapped my hands around the warm ceramic. “My kids. Josie and Nick won’t talk to me. Carmen’s the only one who stuck around, and I’m terrified of losing her too. And I keep thinking—if I’d left Sal earlier, if I’d been braver, if I’d come to Starfall Bay when Amelia was still alive?—“
“Then you’d be a different woman having different regrets.” Lori’s voice was matter-of-fact, but her eyes were kind. “I was a nurse for thirty years. Hit menopause at forty-seven and my world cracked open. I could feel people’s pain—not metaphorically,physically. Thought I was losing my mind. My first husband was alive then. He didn’t understand—thought I was having a breakdown. We fought for months before Amelia found me and explained.”
“What changed?”
“I healed a woman’s migraine by touching her shoulder. In the grocery store, of all places. She’d been crying in the cereal aisle and I just—reached out. And something in me knew.” She looked at me over her glasses. “I was forty-seven. I’d spent my whole life thinking I knew what I was, and then I became something else entirely. It wasn’t wasted time, Gina. It was roots. You can’t bloom without them.”
“What if I bloom into something that just sets things on fire?”
“Then we buy better fire extinguishers.” She reached across the scorched table and squeezed my wrist. That warmth again—the faint easing of tension, the headache I hadn’t noticed receding. “We bloom when we’re ready. Not before. And you’re ready now.”
