already think you’re crazy.” It sounded like she was joking, but her smile was still absent, so I couldn’t tell for sure.
“I used to kind of...be with this girl. She was a Seer. And she talked in her sleep.”
“Okay.” She shrugged. “My ex snored. What does that have to do with your journal?”
I pushed my gun and half-empty mug aside to make room for the notebook on the table between us. “She was a Seer, Sera. She could see the future. Bits of it, anyway. And sometimes the things she said in her sleep were...prophesy. Or whatever you call it.”
Her brows rose. “How do you know?”
“Because some of them came true. So I started...um...writing them down.” I pushed the notebook toward her and when she glanced at me in question, I nodded, giving her permission to peek.
Sera opened the front cover and stared at the name written at the top of the page. Noelle Maddox. “Is that the Noelle? Hadley’s real mother?”
I nodded.
“Does that mean that you’re... That Hadley is...”
“Mine?” I said, and she nodded. “No. There has been some question about her paternity, but I’m not among the possibilities. We weren’t together when she got pregnant.”
“So, Elle was with you and with Olivia’s boss? Cavazos?”
“Yeah, but again, not at the same time. It’s kind of...confusing.”
“No kidding.” Sera’s finger slid from Noelle’s name to the date written on the first line. “That was twelve years ago.”
“Yeah. Shortly after the first time we...got together.”
“So, you slept with a Seer? And took notes?” She flipped through the notebook, and her eyes widened. “A lot of notes. Which would imply a lot of...sleeping.”
“Yeah.” Sometimes Elle and I had had sleepovers even when she and Kori weren’t on speaking terms.
I drank from my mug again, trying to decide how I felt about Sera reading from Noelle’s journal. Not that she was actually reading it, unless she was some kind of super-freak speed-reader. She seemed more interested in the number of passages.
So I tried to decide how I felt about Sera being interested in the number of Noelle’s night-mumblings I’d recorded. And maybe the frequency. Fortunately, she couldn’t judge duration or skill unless she really could read between the lines.
“Why would you take notes?” She looked up from the notebook with her hand spread across the open page.
“Why wouldn’t I take notes? It was like looking into the future through a telescope, and I couldn’t resist the opportunity, even if the lens was out of focus and I couldn’t actually aim it at anything.” I fingered the sharp end of the spiral notebook binding. “Since then, I’ve tried to figure some of them out, but...”
“But it reads like nonsense?” And this time she really was reading. Skimming, at least.
“Yeah. Until something happens, and suddenly one or two of those will make sense. In retrospect, they seem so obvious, but on the front end, it’s like reading a foreign language, without a Noelle-to-Kristopher dictionary.”
She didn’t look up from the page. “Sounds frustrating.”
“You have no idea.” I took a deep breath, trying to figure out how to say what needed to be said without freaking her out any more than necessary. “You’re in there, Sera.”
“What?” She looked up from the passage she’d been reading to frown at me.
“You’re in there.” I took the notebook from her and flipped through the pages, looking for one specific line among hundreds. It was one I knew well, because it was one of few that seemed to give me instructions, rather than random snatches from a conversation I’d never actually been a part of. And finally I found it.
I spun the notebook around on the table, my finger over the date on the entry in question. “See?”
“‘Take the girl in the yellow scarf,’” she read. Then she looked up at me with wide, frightened eyes, her fingers hovering around her collarbone, as if she still wore that scarf. “That’s me? That’s why you kidnapped me? Because of my scarf?”
“I didn’t kidnap you,” I insisted, and she started to argue, but I spoke over her. “Okay, technically, maybe I kidnapped you, but that’s not the point. I didn’t take you because of the scarf—that’s just how I knew who you were. I took you because you’re important.”
“Important how?” Her voice sounded hollow. Skeptical. “Important to what? To whom?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted, and she looked so disappointed I wanted to take it back. But I couldn’t claim to have all the answers. “I hope you’re supposed to help us get Kenley back,