I don’t know how to sort through this all. I keep reading my Pi Day post and wondering if perhaps I really am a witch.

I called my mom yesterday morning and told her I feel like I’m going crazy, so she came over and assured me I’m not that powerful.

“But it sometimes feels like the universe is speaking to me,” I said.

“Of course it is,” she replied. “It speaks to everyone.”

I wanted to write this story, but never in a million years like this. I never imagined this could possibly come true. And yet, I envisioned it, always as a joke with coworkers. The stoner murder mystery I said would be my bestseller. If only I had a plot. Who kills whom—that’s the part I could never figure out. And now it’s been handed to me in the most horrific of ways.

“Count your blessings,” my mom advised. “Go in love.”

Just one night before, Little A said that she knows what 100 plus 100 equals. “110,” she said. I kissed her and corrected her. “When I start kindergarten, and the teacher asks me what 100 plus 100 is, I’m going to write L-O-V-E because love is always the answer,” she told me. I  laughed and suggested she write 200 instead (perhaps adding love in parenthesis).

“Love never fails,” Samantha Stevens had written on her Facebook bio. But as a coworker acknowledged in the tragedy’s aftermath, “Sometimes it does. Spectacularly so.”