She told her mother on a Wednesday. She would regret the timing for years.
It should have been a Sunday, maybe, or a quiet evening with tea and soft light. Not a Wednesday — not a dinner of reheated pasta and the six o'clock news on in the background, not a table where her father ate with his eyes on his phone and her younger brother Caleb kicked the chair leg rhythmically until everyone wanted to scream.
But Nora had spent three weeks since finding that library book carrying the word inside her like a hot coal, and on that Wednesday it simply became too heavy.
"Mom," she said. "I need to tell you something."
Her mother, Sandra, looked up. She had her father's calm face — the kind that gave nothing away, ever. "What is it?"
Nora folded her hands in her lap. She had practiced this. "I think... I know why things happen around me. The lights, the plants dying. The time the car wouldn't start and then did when I touched the hood. I think I'm—"
"Don't." Her mother's voice was so quiet it cut through the news anchor's chatter, through Caleb's kicking, through everything. "Don't say it."
Nora's father looked up from his phone.
"I found a book," Nora said, pressing forward even though her hands were shaking. "And it explained everything, Mom. Every single—"
"I said don't." Her mother stood. She picked up her plate and walked to the sink, and the deliberateness of it — the way she moved away from the table as if Nora had become something threatening — was worse than any shouting could have been. "There is no book that explains anything, Nora. There are coincidences and overactive imaginations and teenagers who want to feel special, and I will not have this in my house."
The kitchen light flickered. Just once. But everyone noticed.
Caleb said, "Whoa, cool."
Her father said, "Sandra—"
Her mother turned on the faucet and didn't turn back around.
That was the whole conversation. Nora sat at the table until her pasta went cold. She understood, with a clarity that was its own kind of grief, that her mother knew. Had always known. And had chosen, every day, not to know.
She went upstairs and lay in the dark and felt the hum beneath her skin grow louder, the way a radio does when you drive under a storm. She pressed her hands flat against the mattress. She breathed.
Outside, it didn't rain. It should have. The pressure in her chest demanded it.
But she held it back.
She was getting good at that. At holding everything back.
She didn't know yet how much that would cost her.