Nick and I went months without speaking. My life felt calamitous. Not just emotional crises, but financial ones as well. I owed boatloads to the federal government in back taxes, to credit-card companies. I had to move. I struggled not to check myself into a hospital, not to bolt to my parents' house in Dallas, not to collapse at work, where I sometimes sat on the tiled bathroom floor and rocked myself back and forth.

But life is a funny thing, isn't it? Two years after my mugging, after the man who hit me over the head with a pistol received fifteen years of jail time, after I fell madly in love with the detective on my case and then watched, helplessly, as he ripped himself away, and after I pulled myself out of a black hole of depression and panic whose details are even foggy to me now — after all that, the New Orleans Police Department sent an official letter announcing that they had found my tote bag and driver's license. And let me tell you something hilarious and ludicrous about that letter: The contact number they gave me was wrong. "This number has been disconnected," the voice on the machine said when I called it.

"The evidence room relocated," Nick explained when I finally got ahold of him. He, too, had relocated — moved to homicide from robbery before we even started dating, and the job had started to gnaw at him. He was investigating the murder of a woman who'd been brutalized in her own apartment; he obsessed about it in the all-consuming way I obsessed about him, running his hands along every little piece of evidence, wondering what questions had not yet been asked, what little sliver of information would bring the whole story screaming into focus.

Anyway, that's why I was on the phone with Nick that afternoon — to talk about how the evidence had arrived, to thank him for making sure it was sent back to me, since he'd had to take time out of this open case to track it down. I wanted to cry about the finality of it. I wanted to talk to him for a million billion hours because, in some symbolic way, it felt as though this case — twenty-eight long months after it had begun — was finally closed.

The psychic continued a little longer. I'd had "a financial calamity" (true), and a rupture with an important friend that had hurt me deeply (I had, and it did). Then she said, "You should come back," and I realized, with not a small amount of disappointment, that my reading had come to an end. It was as though she had snapped her fingers in front of my face, and there I was, yanked back to that colorful and cramped Brooklyn storefront. The reading had taken maybe fifteen minutes. Maybe fewer, maybe more.

"I don't know that I can help you," she said. "But I know that things are a mystery to you right now." The tone of her voice, the calculated clip, suggested she had slipped back into her script. She took a card and wrote her number and name on the back: Ashley.

"For you, I would suggest a candle reading," she said. "Candle readings are forty dollars, but they are guaranteed. I cannot guarantee you will get an answer. But if you don't get an answer, you'll receive your money back. It's really just up to the candle."

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
	Sarah Hepola has been a high-school teacher, a playwright, a film critic, a music editor and a travel columnist. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, The Guardian, and on NPR. She lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.