One That I Want : A Novel

When Tilly's seemingly perfect life starts changing around her, she must decide which is the life she wants-- the one she's carefully tended for decades or the one she never considered possible?Tilly Farmer is thirty-two years old and has the life she always dreamed of married to her high school sweetheart, working as a guidance counselor in her hometown and trying for a baby. Perfect. On the surface you might never know how tough things used to be. At seventeen, Tilly lost her mother to cancer, and while her father drowned his grief in alcohol, she was left to play parent to her two younger sisters rather than be a kid herself. Still Tilly never let tragedy overtake her belief that hard work and good cheer could solve any problem. Of course she's also spent a lifetime plastering a smile on her face and putting everyone else's problems ahead of her own. But that relentless happiness has served her wellher sisters are grown and content, her dad is ten years sober, and she's helping her students achieve all their dreams while she and her husband, Tyler, start a family. A perfect life indeed.One sweltering afternoon at the local fair, everything changes when Tilly wanders into the fortune teller's tent and is greeted by an old childhood friend, now a psychic. ';I'm giving you the gift of clarity,' her friend says. ';It's what I always thought you needed.' Soon Tilly starts seeing things-- her father relapsing, staggering out of a bar and Tyler uprooting their happy, stable life, a packed U-Haul in the driveway. Even more disturbing, these visions start coming true. Suddenly Tilly's perfect life, so meticulously mapped out, seems to be crumbling around her. And she's not sure what's more frightening: that she's begun to see the future or what the future holds.