Prologue
Claudia
My mother used to see things. Growing up, it was normal for me to be in a room with her and to hear her suddenly break into a laugh. She was always doing things like that. If it wasn’t laughing, then it was speaking. I’d listen to her at night talking to herself, a one-sided conversation that always elicited strange responses.
Most people would think living with her like that would be strange, maybe even suffocating. The two of us, stuck together in the tiny two-bedroom apartment, with all those voices that used to keep her company. But it wasn’t strange for me. Things rarely are when it’s all you’ve ever known.
But then one day, things changed. And the voices that she heard, they didn’t make her laugh anymore. Instead, the things she saw and heard made her listless, her eyes became sunken and her movements became sluggish. And for the first time in my seventeen years of life, I wanted to know what she saw in that mind of hers. I wanted to understand what had changed, what made her so... different. And maybe if I had, I could’ve foreseen what was to happen. Maybe then I could’ve... I could’ve stopped her.
But I couldn’t. I didn’t. And now she’s dead.
