Page 5 of A Memory Not Mine (Sanguis Amantium #1)

Chapter five

Mira

D illon and Anne were the only people—aside from my parents—who had ever known about my clairvoyance.

Not even my therapist knew the real reason behind the panic attacks that had landed me on her couch in the first place.

In hindsight, withholding crucial information from the one person trained to help me probably wasn’t the most effective strategy—but hey, radical transparency has never really been my brand.

Officially, I was going to Scotland to meet my father’s last living relatives. Unofficially? I’d become mildly—okay, maybe wildly —obsessed with learning more about Agnes Garvie and figuring out how the hell we were connected.

I had recently connected with some distant relatives on my dad’s side, north of Dundee, through Ancestry.com, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that they might be my last real chance to understand where these visions were coming from and what they meant.

I’d always wanted to understand why I had this ability, this so-called gift that felt more like an unreliable party trick. It had never given me anything useful, like winning lottery numbers or a hot stock tip. Just vague, unsettling glimpses that left more questions than answers .

My dad had it too. He said the only truly valuable thing the Sight ever gave him was my mom.

When he was in college, he said he’d dreamed about her for weeks, a petite woman with big brown eyes, rosy cheeks, and braids wrapped around her head.

Then one afternoon, while driving down a country road, he spotted a woman struggling to change a flat tire on a beat-up baby-blue Volkswagen.

He pulled over to help. When he asked if she needed a hand, she looked up at him with the same eyes from his dreams, her thick hair braided and pinned up like a crown.

She stood, brushed her hands on her skirt, introduced herself as Faith, and shook his hand.

She pointed to her dirndl skirt and apron, as if to explain what she was wearing, and said she was late for a shift at the beer garden in Northampton.

But Billy Garvie didn’t need an explanation, he already knew.

That night, he dropped in for a beer and a plate of schnitzel.

By the end of the evening, he’d asked if she wanted to see a movie sometime.

From that moment on, they were inseparable—thirty-five years together, side by side—until fate took them both on a rain-slicked interstate, not far from the quiet country road where they’d first met.