It was 2001 and Halloween was approaching. A good friend was helping her boyfriend host his annual Halloween party, but this year was different. She was adding fun events to raise money for a charity near and dear to her heart.

During the past two years, particularly the past year, she was witness to my premonition skills, both in how I could see and sense upcoming events for people we knew, always telling me, “No way!” and then because she was dealing with a life-changing event and was asking me what I was seeing. She was shocked as the events played out just as I had seen them.

At first, I didn’t want to share what I was seeing, but she told me that knowing comforted her. So, I told her. The events unfolded just as I’d seen them.

For her party, she wanted me to come out and act as a reader for people she and her boyfriend knew but who were strangers to me. I said no because I had never performed publicly. I didn’t feel comfortable doing it. What if I was wrong? My premonitions were always personal and focused on people I was close to. I’d never forced my insight before, not like this, anyway. The things I felt and saw came on their own.

I wasn’t sure I could manage the humiliation if I was wrong, but she stated it was just for fun and that no one would expect anything from me.

Right away, I knew that statement wasn’t true. How many times had I gone to a reading and had huge expectations?

I decided I needed to stop focusing on myself and let go of those feelings. Instead, I focused on the group of people, as a whole, who would attend and how they would see it as just a fun activity.

Two weeks before the party, I told her I was sensing that someone at the party was either being horribly abused or was in the process of ending an abusive relationship.

“You can’t tell anyone that!”

“I don’t plan to,” I replied, but I had wanted her to be aware of the situation. Since most of my premonitions dealt with the terrible things that happen to people, and which I usually always kept to myself, wrote in my journal, or confided to a good friend, I had no intention of relaying this information to a mere stranger. I would focus, instead, on little mundane things like favorite foods, colors, movies, and such.

During the two weeks up until the party, I kept receiving this person’s energy. I had a sense that everything was turning out okay.

The night of the party, I was ensconced in the bedroom, the room dark, with only a few candles lit, the curtains open against the pitch-black night and my back against the door to prevent any other energies from coming into the room even though the door was closed during our reading. On the table was a basket of objects I’d collected over time and which, for me, held positive powers:  stones, crystals, twigs, an acorn, a chestnut, and some feathers.

People trailed into the room, one at a time. Some people I immediately connected to and had a sense of something happening that I could convey. I was able to provide readings that were fun and mostly true, even surprising for everyone other than one man, because he had put up such a wall of disbelief that I could not get beyond. His disbelief was forefront with everything else about him stored safe from observation…or so he thought.

He was instant that I read him, and I tried. But, all I could tell him was that I couldn’t read him because of the wall he’d put up.

When he returned to the party complaining that I was a fraud because I couldn’t read him because he was blocking me, they laughed at him, telling him I had completely read him true.

Late into the night, I was done, rising from my seat when my friend entered the room and asked if I could do one more reading.

I was exhausted, as I’d been reading for four hours without a break. She pleaded, and I said, “Okay,” affirming this one absolutely had to be the last one. She agreed.

My back to the door, she entered the room. Immediately, the energy changed. It was charged, filled with electric sparks.

A woman, who appeared to be in her 30s, sat down opposite me and said in a soft-spoken voice that she had just moved. Her face was in shadows, so I couldn’t see her clearly. Chills ran up and down my legs, down my spine, and across my back and neck. “You’re the one,” I whispered.

She stiffened in surprise, then said, “Tell me.” I sensed that consciously, she wanted the unvarnished truth. I could feel her spirit pleading with mine to reveal what I knew. Immediately, I knew it would be wrong not to tell her the truth.

“You’re either being abused or just came out of a horribly abusive relationship.”

She gasped in surprise, then sagged in obvious relief. “No one knows this, and you don’t know how much I’ve wanted to tell someone. I knew I had to leave in order to save my life and didn’t know what to do. Two weeks ago, all of a sudden, I knew it would be okay as if someone was looking out for me,” she said. We talked at length about her fear, about finding her strength. When she got up to leave, she said, “I don’t know how you knew, or when you knew, but I believe your knowing is where I got my strength to move out.”