Energized by Mary Behre Read Free Book Online Page A

redoubled pain, she glanced at the picture of the three smiling siblings and whispered, “I’m sorry, my darling girls, but it’s better to be alone than with a liar.”
    Hannah pulled back from the vision and released the pendant, letting it dangle from the chain around her neck. She took a moment to center herself.
    â€œI’m Hannah Halloran.” She slowed her rapid breathing and let go of the last of the lingering pain from her mother’s cancer. But it was hard. The only time she could even remember what her first mother sounded like was during a psychometric event.
    While she took the pendant with her everywhere, she’d touched it only a few times since her adopted parents had given it to her last winter.
    The morning after she’d spent the night with her handsome Marine.
    A different sort of pain snuck into the space in her heart he’d somehow claimed in those few hours, but she refused to let it ruin the memory. She’d known he’d leave and notreturn. She’d seen the signs before their first kiss and still she’d taken him to her bed. Thank God!
    The snippet of sorrow at his never calling was worth every second they’d spent together. Not that she’d had much time to grieve that day.
    Her parents had surprised her with the news that her birth sisters were searching for her. She’d grown up with the memory of her adoption at the age of three. Still, having a private detective come to Fincastle looking for her was unexpected. Something she’d had little time to process that morning because her parents followed up the big news with something even more amazing. Her mother’s locket.
    They had expected her to be angry for keeping the chain and pendant from her for almost twenty years, but anger was the last thing she’d felt. She understood their reason for keeping it sealed in a bag in their home safe. Their care of the locket kept her mother’s energy undiluted. Had it been handled repeatedly for twenty years, the vision Hannah received would likely have dimmed with time.
    She tried explaining this, but it didn’t erase the worry from their faces. It was their worry that kept her from returning the call to the private detective of Tidewater Security Specialists. As illogical as it seemed, her wonderful, caring parents feared she’d choose her old family over her current one. Like adoption made their bond somehow less.
    Sometimes parents could be so silly. She loved Axel and Rosalind Halloran for giving her a home and a family and better life than she could ever have hoped for in the system. So she’d waited six months before telling them she intended to spend the summer in Tidewater getting to know the sisters she only vaguely remembered. Perhaps it was illogical to want more when she already had so much. But as her father had so often said when she asked why they’d chosen to adopt her and not another child, “The heart wants what the heart wants.”
    And right now, her heart wanted to find her sisters. But her head buzzed as she fought to withdraw from the vision.
    She’d sunk too far into her mother’s memory and the present seemed like a faded dream. “I’m Hannah Halloran,” she said again, trying to center herself firmly in the current reality.
    She tugged off the necklace and dropped it into the small zippered pocket of her tie-dyed backpack. She repeated her name twice more before she broke with the past and was fully herself again.
    The Woodshire Avenue from her vision was a bit different from the Woodshire Avenue of present day. The car across the street had changed from a Geo Metro to a Prius. The maple trees were no longer dwarfish but towered at eighteen feet. The pitched-roof church with the stained glass window still stood tall and proud.
    Hannah turned on her heel and sought her mother’s house. This was the right spot. But it wasn’t her mother’s cottage. The little