Free The Precious One by Marisa de los Santos

swore my writing was perfection, and then ordered changes. It was exhilarating. I had never loved any job more.
    I discovered that I had a gift for capturing people with words. Wait, capturing is wrong. More like channeling. I might have been a ghostwriter, but I was the one who was haunted. When I wrote, I was ten times more Trillium than I was myself. When I got stuck, I exercised more patience than I had maybe ever, waiting for the right question to come to me (What was the best gift you ever got as a kid? Who is your favorite March sister?). When it did, I’d ask Trillium the question and her answer would unstick me, reveal the path I needed to take.
    Trillium’s book sold like hotcakes, stayed on the New York Times bestseller list enough weeks to choke a goat, as Trillium liked to say. After that, I ditched the business writing and became a ghostwriter for real, and the right question became my secret weapon, my ace in the hole. It never stopped amazing me, how the tiniest fact, once discovered, could pop open a window with a vista-sized view of a person’s inner world. How you could learn, for example, that a person had had six dogs in his lifetime, all named Boxer, even though none of them was a boxer, and—boom—there you were, standing smack in the middle of at least an acre of the man’s soul.
    But getting back to rule number five of the follow-up to her memoir: Trillium Shippey’s Life RULES!
    The second after I finished telling Trillium, in one, long manic rush of words, about my impending visit to my father’s house and all the accompanying anxieties, layer upon layer of anxiety, an anxiety trifle , she said, “Okay, I’ll be at your house in five minutes. Meanwhile, here is what you need to do.”
    Her voice dropped, got soft and rhythmic, like a rocking cradle. “Close your eyes and draw a magic circle in the sand. Inside the circle are clear air, sunlight, birds singing. Nothing bad can enter the circle, not one bad memory, not one fear for the future, not one regret, not one perceived personal shortcoming.”
    “Thank you for ‘perceived,’” I told her.
    “You’re welcome. Be quiet. Now, step into the circle, really picture yourself doing it. One leg, the other leg. And once you’re in the center, simply be. Root yourself. Let the peace soak into you, all the way into the marrow of your bones. Soak and soak and soak. Is it soaking in?”
    And, you know, it really sort of was.
    The next thing I knew, we were at the mall.
    While it may be hard to maintain a sense of bone-marrow-saturated peace at malls, I mostly like them. They suit me, particularly as I am a mission shopper. If it’s a black dress I need, I start at one end of the mall and go store to store, methodically trying on one dress after the next, leaving no stone unturned, spurred ever onward by the possibility that the perfect black dress, the oh-my-God-you-are-the-spitting-image-of-Audrey-Hepburn dress (even though Audrey would naturally never spit) might be waiting, a shining sleeve of night sky on a hanger, in the very next shop.
    But going shopping with Trillium is something else altogether. “Shopping” is far too prosaic a word. She’s more like one of those people who lead expeditions into rain forests, seeking out new kinds of orchids or thumb-sized lacquered tree frogs or cures for cancer. It’s amazing, how she’ll walk into a store, zero in on, say, a rhinestoneheadband, lift it to eye level, gingerly, using just her fingertips, and begin to describe its virtues, the individually clasped stones—five prongs!—the woven silver vines of metal, all in such hushed, wonderfilled tones that you forget that the thing costs $11.99, that you are standing in a teenybopper store with a display of Cat in the Hat hats to your right and boy band lunch boxes to your left. All you see is a tiny thing of beauty, a delicate, dew-jeweled spiderweb of loveliness.
    The mission was to find a father/daughter/stepsister/stepmother