Gabriella knew instinctively that the search had heightened. Her mother's heels rattled past again, pounding harder on the floor this time. None of what she had encountered in her six brief years was what they could have promised her in heaven. She looked startled much of the time, like an angel who had fallen to earth, and had not known what to expect here. People who scarcely knew her said that she looked like a little angel. Gabriella was small for her age, undersize, underweight, and she had an elfin quality about her, with huge blue eyes, and soft blond curls. But she hid anyway, had to try at least, to escape her. Gabriella knew that no matter where she hid, eventually her mother would find her. She could find her anywhere, almost as though she could detect her scent, the pull of mother to child inevitable, unavoidable, her mother's deep, inky-brown eyes all-seeing, all-knowing. Even at six, she knew that her mother had supernatural powers. She let herself breathe again, just once, and then held her breath, as though even the sound of it would draw her mother's attention. The sharp clicking of her mother's heels clattered past like an express train roaring through town, she could almost feel the air whoosh past her face with relief in the crowded closet. It was stifling where she stood, her eyes wide in the darkness, waiting, barely daring to breathe, as she heard muffled footsteps approaching from the distance. She had hidden here before, it had always been a good hiding place for her, a place they never thought to look, especially now, in the heat of a New York summer. She knew that here, no one would find her. She stumbled over a pair of her mother's winter boots, as she moved farther back into the closet. It was filled with winter coats, and they scratched her face, as she pressed her thin six-year-old frame as far back as she could, deep among them. A CLOCK TICKED LOUDLY in the hall as Gabriella Harrison stood silently in the utter darkness of the closet.