Admissions was called, and Esther’s wristband was read and reread and electronically scanned several times. Elizabeth had finally pulled off Esther’s surgery cap and oxygen mask and studied the woman’s face.

It was her. Her hair was a bit whiter, and her features were no longer drawn in pain, but the woman on her operating table was the same woman she had prayed over less than an hour ago.

Elizabeth could only stare at her silent team then. Something had gone terribly, terribly wrong.

Or wonderfully right for Esther Brown.

Oh, yes. Grammy Bea was surely laughing her head off, telling everyone in Heaven about the miracle. And, like a house of cards facing a gale, Elizabeth saw her career as a surgeon being scattered to the wind.

She had walked away from the operating room without saying a word to anyone. She had started to leave the hospital, but something had compelled her to push the up button in the elevator instead of the one that would take her down to the lobby. The elevator door had opened on the children’s ward, and Elizabeth had found herself walking to young Jamie Garcia’s room.

That morning, Jamie had arrived with a head injury he’d sustained when his bicycle had rolled into the path of a car. He was in a coma, and the prognosis was bad.

Elizabeth had sat beside Jamie, taken his young hand in hers, and quietly willed him to wake up. And again her body had warmed, her skin tightened, and her pulse slowed.

The rainbow of brilliant colors had returned.

And Jamie Garcia had opened his eyes and smiled at her.

Elizabeth hadn’t walked away that time. She had run.

She refilled her tumbler with Scotch and took the drink with her as she paced to the window. She stared out at the skyline, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. She could just make out the surgery unit, where she had always felt so comfortable, vital, and in charge

—of herself and of any situation she faced.

Until today.

In one blinding moment, as she’d stood facing her trauma team over the anesthetized body of Esther Brown, Elizabeth had realized that she wasn’t in charge at all.

In her flight from Jamie’s room, and for the entire ride down to the lobby, she had fought the urge to run through the hospital and pray over patients. The need to heal had been so overwhelming that Elizabeth had felt as if she might explode. The only world she had known for thirty-one years was unraveling around her in a maelstrom of swirling colors, tugging at her until she felt herself being consumed by the chaos.

Yes, she had been completely out of control.

She needed to figure out what was happening. All of her life, Grammy Bea had told Elizabeth about the women in her family who supposedly had this gift. The last one had been her great-aunt Sylvia, who had died almost twenty years ago. All the women with this gift had had some sort of oddity or physical anomaly. Elizabeth’s great-great-grandmother, she’d been told, had two different colored eyes. Great-aunt Sylvia had been born with hair down to her waist, and throughout her life, it had continued to grow at an amazing rate. Elizabeth remembered being taken to Sylvia’s funeral when she was only eleven or twelve and seeing her great-aunt’s braided hair all but filling the casket.

Elizabeth tugged on her own white lock of hair, pulling it forward and lifting her gaze, then blowing it back into place with a sigh. She’d laughed at Grammy Bea’s stories as a child, dismissing them as tales designed to add excitement to a lonely girl’s life.

Well, she wasn’t laughing anymore.

She couldn’t go back to the hospital. Not with all of those sick and injured people tugging at her. Not if she wished to keep her sanity.

The phone rang, blaring into the silence of the town house. Elizabeth turned with a start, sloshing her drink onto her hand, and stared at the phone on the table by the couch.

She didn’t want to talk to anyone.

It rang five agonizing times before the answering machine finally picked up. Elizabeth listened to her own voice tell the caller to leave a message and then caught her breath when James Kessler’s voice suddenly filled her living room.

“Elizabeth. Are you there? Pick up the phone, Elizabeth, I want to talk to you.”

There was ten seconds of silence.

“Elizabeth! Pick up the phone, and tell me what happened to Jamie Garcia. I know you were in his room this afternoon. His monitors went off, and when Sally Pritchard ran to check on him, she saw you leaving.”

Another ten seconds of silence, and then, “Elizabeth, pick up the phone!”

She took a step forward but stopped. James Kessler was a neurologist and family friend, and Jamie Garcia was his patient. He wanted an explanation from her, but what could she tell him? That she’d laid her hands on the boy and magically healed him?

“Dammit, Elizabeth. You call me the minute you get home.”

The answering machine beeped, and the red message light started flashing the moment James broke the connection. Elizabeth took another sip of her Scotch.

She had to get out of there. Hell, she had to get out of California. There was no way she could face James or her colleagues or even Esther Brown. How could she explain to any of them what she couldn’t explain to herself?

She needed time to think—and some distance wouldn’t hurt, either. Until she could come up with an explanation that wouldn’t get her committed to a sanitarium, she had to avoid everyone.

But did that include her mother? Katherine knew their family history, and, like Elizabeth, she preferred to believe their female ancestors had been eccentric rather than gifted. Having hair that grew excessively, two different-colored eyes, or a white forelock was not damning, it was—well, it was the stuff of family legends.

Of course, Elizabeth had talked to her mother on more than one occasion during her childhood about Grammy Bea’s tales. Katherine had been quick to dismiss them as wishful thinking, saying Bea had always been jealous of Aunt Sylvia’s claim that she had been the one blessed with the gift. Bea thought of herself as an Earth Mother and had grown and gathered and processed herbs that she sold on her small farm up in the mountains. And since Bea had only one daughter, and since Katherine didn’t have any

“sign” of being special, Bea was simply projecting the gift onto her granddaughter.

Made sense to Elizabeth.

Or it did at the time.

But it certainly didn’t explain what had happened today. Even now, her body still quivered with a strange energy. Her head felt as if it was stuffed with cotton. Her living room, cast in shadows, seemed to pulse gently with an unnatural light that was more in her mind’s eye than visual.

Elizabeth sat back down on the couch and stared at the fire. All these years, Grammy Bea had been trying so hard to give her a glimpse of something beyond surgery. Up until Bea’s death just two months ago, she had committed herself to grounding Elizabeth in the natural—or, rather, the unnatural—world.

And that had driven Barnaby Hart crazy until the day he himself had died four years ago. Her father used to complain that it took him two weeks to straighten Elizabeth out when she returned from a visit to her grandmother’s farm. She usually came home with a suitcase full of medicinal herbs, tinctures, and balms and would have to hide them before her dad could throw them away.

She would place them in with her mother’s toiletries, having figured out early that hiding something in plain sight was best. Besides, Katherine knew the value of herbs, being Bea’s daughter, and used them whenever she felt a cold coming on or a wrinkle dared to show itself on her beautiful face.

The phone rang again, startling Elizabeth a second time. She held her breath for all five rings, listened to her voice tell the caller to leave a message, and then heard only silence.