Touched - By Cyn Balog Page 0,71

days,” I said.

“It’s fine, though,” she said. “All I need to do is—”

“She’s not coming,” I muttered.

She stared at me. “What?”

“Your five o’clock appointment.” When her eyes narrowed I said, “I figured out who it was. I knew the person. I didn’t want her to ruin her life. So I convinced her not to do it.”

Her eyes filled with something, not anger, but desperation. Horror. “You … what? Why?”

“Because I thought I was doing you a favor! I thought you wanted to get out of it. That was before I knew you would drop dead in three days if you didn’t go through with it. That makes a big difference.” I squeezed the words out of my tightening throat.

She turned and walked away, hands on hips, and then came back. Her voice was softer, more in control. “Can we ixnay the eying-day talk?”

“Sorry,” I muttered. “But hell! I can’t believe I … What are we going to do now?”

“Shhh, don’t freak. Grandma says she has some other interest,” Taryn said, thinking aloud. But she shivered as she tightened the scarf around her shoulders. She was trying to convince herself.

I studied her. She looked perfect, and there wasn’t a trace of sickness, fatigue, anything bad on her. It seemed impossible to believe that someone so full of life could succumb to that curse and die within seventy-two hours. Not an hour ago, she was acting so nonchalant about the whole thing, joking with me and laughing about it. “I’m so sorry, Taryn. Are you—I mean, how are you? Do you feel okay?”

She nodded. “Yeah. Sometimes I think it must be wrong. That it’s all a bunch of bunk. Sometimes I think I can just go about my life, ignore it, and it will leave me alone. So I push it out of my head. Like if I can keep it out of my head, it will be okay.”

“It will be,” I said, and I put my arm around her. Her brow was still tense, knitted, so I said, “Remember, I can see the future? You are not dying anytime in the near future. You have nothing to worry about.”

It was the only lie I ever told her. But wow, what a lie.

I walked Taryn home on the boardwalk. It was a long walk, two miles, and a cold breeze was blowing in from the ocean, but it felt good to move, to have the wind blowing against my chest. It was a reminder that we were still here.

“Have your visions changed?” she asked me quietly.

“Maybe,” I said to her, silently adding, Doubtfully. I didn’t bother to tell her that I’d seen it again, in the pizza place. And that it scared me. I wasn’t sure why the vision of us in Beauty was so persistent. Just making the promise never to get into her Jeep should have been enough to steer it off course. And these past few days, I’d often disregarded the script, so much so that the ache in my head was a dull, constant pain between my eyes. I’d hoped that by doing that, something would change. Still, whenever I let the visions come in now, it was always there, the final act of the sad and tumultuous play that was my life. I’d been starting to wonder if some things about life were like that: meant to be, unbreakable. Destiny. Like building a house of cards, it doesn’t matter how you build it, or what you do to make it strong. Eventually, it always comes down. But I couldn’t tell Taryn that. She had enough going on anyway. “It’s hard to tell. The You Wills aren’t as strong when I’m with you. And I haven’t been paying attention to them as much because I was trying to … I don’t know.”

We walked a little while longer, until she stopped and said, “I want to walk on the beach. Don’t you?”

I didn’t. It was freezing, and after Emma I didn’t know if I’d be okay with going out there. But I kicked off my shoes and followed her anyway. The sand was warm between my toes. She was right. It felt good. When we were halfway down the beach, she turned to me.

“Thank you for being there tonight,” she said.

I laughed. “I ruined everything.”

“No, you didn’t,” she said. “It meant a lot to me that you would be there. I knew it probably wouldn’t be easy for you to see what your mother went through.”

That didn’t bother me.