Joan will pass in the winter, but you’ll open a new chapter in your life soon after with a man who needs you even more than you need him. He’ll be your soul mate, and you’ll finally become a bride instead of a bridesmaid.
Randi shook her head with a sad smile, remembering the certainty on Beatrice’s face that day.
Picking up her pace, she trudged quickly through the lightly falling snow on the sidewalk. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe that supernatural talents could exist, but she didn’t take the elderly woman’s words too seriously. She’d known Beatrice since she’d moved to Amesport as a teen. Some of her predictions were eerily accurate, some of them weren’t. Randi’s rational mind was telling her that the accurate predictions Beatrice made could simply be coincidence. They had to be flukes. Randi was open-minded, but she had to draw the line at somebody knowing her future. She believed in people deciding their own fate or destiny. Anything else was just . . . chance.
She waited for traffic to clear before she sprinted across the street, her boots sliding in the snow as she stopped breathlessly in front of Brew Magic. She ignored the sensation that the crystal in her pocket appeared to warm beneath her fingers, before she jerked her hands from the warmth of the fleece compartments to hastily attempt to right her damp, wind-tossed hair.
“Beatrice’s stone is not magic, and her prediction is nothing more than nonsense,” she told herself forcefully as she brushed the snow from her head and tried to make herself presentable to go chat with Liam. “Things like that don’t happen to women like me. I make my own luck and my own future.”
Considering her past, Randi was happy with her life, even though she was still grieving for Joan. She had a good education, a good job, and friends who meant everything to her. If she was lonely sometimes now that her foster mother was gone, she’d get through it. Her earlier childhood had taught her that life was tough, and wishes didn’t often become reality. Dennis and Joan coming into her life had been her miracle, if there was any such thing. She didn’t need any more than what they’d given her: a home for a homeless girl with no hope for the future.
Randi tried not to remember that Beatrice had predicted that Dennis and Joan would still have a child, even after all hope of Joan getting pregnant was long gone. Before her foster parents had left on vacation to California, Beatrice had reminded them of her prediction, saying her spirit guides had told her that they’d find their daughter while they were on their Southern California sightseeing tour.
Joan had been a firm believer in Beatrice’s gift of premonitions. Being a realist, Randi had always been on the fence.
“Beatrice runs about fifty-fifty on her predictions,” Randi whispered to herself. “She was right about Jared and Mara, so she’s due to be wrong about mine.”
Chastising herself for standing in the brutal weather contemplating a silly rock, Randi hurried into Brew Magic, determined not to regret the fact that she’d had to cut her conversation short with her pen pal because of her prior engagement.
She tried not to think about what S. was doing right at the moment as she searched the crowded coffee shop for Liam.
CHAPTER 3
Evan waited impatiently for his turn at the coffee shop in Amesport, having stood in line for almost ten minutes before arriving at the front of the queue. He wasn’t used to standing in line, and his turn was usually immediate. He was wasting time, and that annoyed him. He didn’t squander time that he could be using for work, and he didn’t spend any evenings so distracted that he stopped the dictation he’d been doing on an important financial report to find a diversion.
He’d ended up driving himself to Brew Magic for a nonfat mocha coffee with no whipped cream, a beverage he’d come to tolerate after Jared kept dragging him into the coffee shop to get his fix. If Jared was here, he wouldn’t be sparing the whipped cream or the fat. Evan’s younger brother liked his coffee with every available evil known to man, usually accompanied by several of the calorie-, sugar-, and fat-laden pastries that Evan could now see gracing the shelves of the racks behind the glass.
“Can I help you, sir?” A friendly teenager stepped up to assist him as Evan became the next person to place his order.
He quickly told the smiling girl what he wanted, feeling uncomfortable in the cramped, busy space. People were vying for tables to sit and sip coffee, probably to get out of the frigid temperatures outside. People milled around him as he waited for his coffee to be blended.