Chapter 2: The Taste of Power

The paramedics said Grandma Carol was gone by the time they arrived. At the hospital, Mom hugged me while I cried—big, shuddering sobs. She never once blamed me for not finding the pills. Everyone chalked it up to a tragic accident.

Sweat trickled down my back as I stood in scratchy black, cicadas screaming louder than the preacher. Relatives I barely remembered squeezed me tight, their faces pinched with sympathy.

But it was after the funeral, in the sticky quiet of Grandma’s empty kitchen, that I realized something was off.

All at once, I could cook, sew, even coax tomatoes from the backyard dirt—skills I’d never learned. It was like my hands just knew what to do. I could tell bread dough was ready just by touch, or thread Grandma's old sewing machine without thinking. There were no memories of learning any of it—just the knowledge, as if it had always been there.

One day, I tasted my own hash browns and they were exactly like Grandma Carol’s. The house even smelled like her—oil, onions, and a trace of lavender hand lotion.

That’s when the wild suspicion I’d buried started to sprout, roots twisting deep inside me. I told no one. I just carried it through the fall, hiding behind forced smiles and awkward Sunday dinners.