Chapter 1 June 27, Olathe, Kansas The man who was going to stand by and watch while Helen burned to death liked his coffee black. Helen looked up from her menu and, across the little diner, she saw him sitting there, not twenty feet away. He was the man of her dreams—or more accurately, of her visions. Technically it was just one vision. Over and over. She was going up in flames while he watched. Smiling at her. “See something you like?” asked Lexi, the diner’s only waitress on duty. She’d been working at Gertie’s Diner for only a couple of months now, but there was something about her that made Helen trust her enough to share things no other living person knew, including Helen’s vision of her own death. “Cook’s gone for the day, so all we have left is meat loaf, baked chicken, and pot roast. Pick your poison.” Across from Helen, her dinner companion, Miss Mabel, sat low in the red vinyl booth. Her age-hunched shoulders barely cleared the table. Her gnarled hands gripped the laminated menu, which wavered so much Helen wasn’t sure how she could read it without getting motion sickness. “How’s the meat loaf?” asked Miss Mabel. Lexi was a petite twenty-something with a killer body and a brain to match. What she was doing waiting tables in Olathe, Kansas, living