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who feel good about themselves don’t run away and become prostitutes,” Selena Lazone said.
    “I told you I like fucking!”
    “And I know girls who feel good about themselves,” Selena continued evenly, “don’t try this.” She reached out, tightly encircled Kristin’s left wrist and turned the girl’s hand over. Kristin’s fingers shot up like the legs of a dying spider. Running along the blue veins on the underside of her wrist were two reddish, puckered scars—a serious suicide attempt.
    The child’s face turned white, and a sheen of tears glazed her eyes.
    And Selena Lazone froze.
    She understood.
    But no, not this way, she thought. She was a psychologist, a scientist, not a cohalyi. Not an ababina. Not a gule romni! A psychologist—not a witch or a sorceress.
    “You’re…hurting me,” Kristin said in a pinched voice, as she struggled to pull free of Selena’s grip.
    Hurting her, Selena thought as she turned loose the girl’s wrist. Nearly all of Kristin Heidmann’s life had been a hurting, and if Kristin were ever to escape that all-encompassing, enveloping pain, then paradoxically there would have to be still more hurting—and it would have to begin now.
    But now she could do something for Kristin; she could help her. She had the tool to crack the girl’s emotional and psychic armor, and it didn’t matter how that tool had been placed in her hand.
    That’s what Selena tried to tell her herself, but she was still afraid.
    Quietly, Selena said, “Tell me about Poppy.”
    Kristin’s jaw dropped. Beneath her teary left eye, there was a fluttery tic. “You don’t know. You can’t!” she whispered.
    But Selena Lazone did know, of course. Dukkeripin, the Gypsies called it—ESP, the sixth sense, psychometry, the terms employed by investigators of psychic phenomena. She was the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, born with a caul over her face, and so dukkeripin, this way of knowing that did not rely on the rational senses, was her birthright, one that she’d rejected, part of a life she had fled. But her powers of dukkeripin had been dormant for years and years; a talent not used, not even wanted, is a talent that atrophies and dies. That is what she had believed, what she had so fervently hoped.
    “You cannot run faster than your shadow” was what old Pola Janichka had taught her. Tshatsimo, Romany truth.
    “Poppy,” Selena insisted. “Your grandfather. You loved him.”
    Kristin nodded. “He was always making jokes. He kept saying stuff like about how I had to eat mashed potatoes because that would put hair on my chest. He used to take me fishing…”
    Kristin fell silent.
    “The first time,” Selena said, “you were six years old, staying with Poppy and your grandmother.”
    Kris nodded, then she exploded. “No, I promised. I said I would never tell. I promised Poppy.”
    “It’s time to break that promise, Kristin. You have to. Your grandfather was wrong, wrong to make you promise that and wrong to do what he did. You were a little girl, Kris, a baby, and you loved him and trusted him and he took advantage of that.”
    “Poppy wasn’t a bad man.”
    “Maybe not, Kris, but he did bad things to you.”
    “But it was my fault. I made him! He told me it was my fault!”
    “Wrong, Kris. You were a victim. You were the good little girl who did what her Poppy told her, what he made you do. And until we talk about it, get it out in the open so that you can start seeing it all for what it really was, you’re going to keep on being a victim.”
    Head down, Kristin sobbed dryly.
    “Kristin,” Selena said gently, “trust me.”
    It all came out then, with explosive bursts of tears and gurgled sobs. Kristin’s story of being sexually abused could have been an archetypical case study from a psychology textbook, Selena thought. “Kristin H’s grandfather introduced her to ‘our secret game,’ sexually fondling her, having her fondle him. When she was nine, Kristin H’s