1 You can’t turn off intuition after you’ve spent years developing the sense, honing it to a razor’s edge. I could feel something gathering among the seemingly innocent racks of clothing. The voices of my two best friends in the world faded into a background buzz, and I found myself shifting the way I was holding the shirts I’d planned to take to the dressing room so that I could use my hands if needed. My eyes moved from person to person in rapid succession while my feet backed toward a wide aisle that could be easily navigated. The bored but patient father of a tween girl wasn’t a threat. Neither was the mother with one child in a stroller and another held by the hand. Clerks moved among the holiday-festooned racks like ballerinas performing The Nutcracker; I tracked them briefly. The best salespeople are often empaths or psychics. They’re attuned to those shoppers who want approval—codependents in the process. They weren’t the cause of my alarm, either. Or were they? Nothing I could see accounted for the tingling of my skin. It forced me to raise the bar and start checking the area over again, which made me noticeable. “What’s wrong, Celia?” Dawna had taken one look at my face and begun to spill panic from her pores. The whisper from her perfectly colored and edged lips held an edge of fear.