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touch me. Don’t you?”
    His face seemed to crumple. “I—no. I didn’t realize.”
    She perched on the edge of the armchair, knees too wobbly to remain standing. “Well, I can. So can David. That’s what they did to us—the Imria.”
    “I thought it was only between you and David,” her mom said.
    “I think it works with anyone, if we’re touching them.”
    Her parents sat in silence for a few minutes, absorbing what she had said. She couldn’t look at them—she was too conscious of her dad’s feelings—but she saw her mom reach out and put a hand on her dad’s knee.
    “If that’s true, I’m glad you felt how I was feeling,” her dad finally said. His voice was husky, and Reese didn’t know what to say. Her dad didn’t act like this around her. He was funny and charming on his best days, and on his worst he might be distant or cold, but he was never vulnerable. Unless she had simply never noticed before.
    She got to her feet. “I’d better call David and warn him about Highsmith,” she said, and fled the living room before her parents could respond.

CHAPTER 4
    Diana Warner had dark brown hair cut just above her shoulders in expertly sculpted layers—the kind of hair you saw on female senators and businesswomen—and her red-brown lipstick was applied so flawlessly it didn’t come off at all when she sipped the glass of water Reese’s dad brought her. Reese soon learned that Diana did everything with the same precise, purposeful conviction. Reese suspected that her father had spent a lot of money to hire her.
    She had arrived at their house on Saturday morning at ten o’clock sharp to interview Reese and her parents about what happened in the time between her abduction and her return a week and a half later. Then she drove off to do the same with David and his family, coming back a few hours later to take Reese and David shopping for clothes to wear on camera. She looked a bitbreathless upon her return, and as Reese grabbed her bag to follow, Diana said, “The crowd is feisty this afternoon. There are police outside who will escort us to my car, but why don’t you pull that hood over your head? And put on some sunglasses.”
    Reese’s parents were standing in the hall behind her. “Are you sure this is safe?” her mom asked.
    “We’ll be fine,” Diana assured her. “We’re just going to Nordstrom, and I have a driver. There’s no need to worry.”
    Reese doubted a hoodie and sunglasses could do much to help, but she had watched the crowd through the cracks in her blinds upstairs, and she definitely didn’t want to go out there totally exposed. She tried to prepare herself for the onslaught of the crowd’s emotions by imagining a brick wall around her, blocking people off. “Let’s go,” she said.
    “We’ll be back in a couple of hours,” Diana said, and she opened the door.
    Outside, the crowd moved in a slow, continuous circle down Reese’s street, around the block and back again. Reese had heard on the news that the City of San Francisco was considering what could be done to clear the neighborhood, but there was no law against walking down a public sidewalk—only against lying down on one—and none of the gawkers lay down. Diana led the way down the front steps, where two uniformed police officers were waiting for them. “I’m parked two blocks north,” she told them.
    The onlookers nearby had watched as Reese came outside, and she felt the tiny psychic jabs that accompanied their glances. She tried to focus on her imaginary wall as the cops told them to move on.
    Most of the crowd was heading west to circle the neighborhood, but Reese and Diana had to go east to get to the corner, where they would turn north. They were forced to push against the tide of onlookers, and even though they had a police escort, it was slow going. Luckily, the pedestrians were so intent on keeping their eyes on the sky that most of them didn’t notice it was Reese trying to walk in the