Mind Games

Twelve-year-old Thea Fox and her ten-year-old brother Rem live with their parents, John and Cora, in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where the couple runs a successful design business. Every summer the children visit their maternal grandmother, Lucy Lannigan, in Redbud Hollow, Kentucky. Lucy keeps animals, grows food, and produces soaps and medicinal preparations for her Mountain Magic business. Thea has inherited a psychic gift found among the women in Lucy's family. She can perceive another person's thoughts, memories, or experiences under circumstances she does not always control. Cora is uneasy about the ability, but Lucy understands and respects it. Thea is happiest at the farm and also spends years imagining a fantasy world called Endon.

While the children are in Kentucky, eighteen-year-old Ray Riggs notices Cora's expensive anniversary watch at a grocery store and follows her home. Riggs himself can enter or read minds, but uses the power to exploit and hurt people. He has already committed murders and stolen a vehicle. At night he cuts through a sliding door and enters the Fox home with a gun. He shoots John through a pillow, forces Cora to reveal the combination to the safe, and kills her as well. He steals money, jewelry, Cora's watch, and a photograph of Thea. In Kentucky, Thea experiences the violence through a psychic connection to the murderer. Lucy senses the deaths separately, and together they call local law enforcement. Neither woman has physically traveled to Virginia, and Thea has not simply imagined a scene that can be dismissed as an ordinary nightmare.

Sheriff Tate McKinnon and Deputy Alice Driscoll hear Thea's detailed description of the attack. Virginia authorities investigate the actual crime scene, and police artist Mai Wu helps Thea describe the suspect. She perceives Riggs at a motel near Fayetteville, North Carolina, where officers arrest him and recover the watch, photograph, gun, and other physical evidence. Riggs confesses and receives life sentences rather than face a capital prosecution. The children learn that John and Cora named Lucy their guardian. Their wealthy paternal grandmother, Christine Fox, demands control over funeral arrangements and wants to take them away, but Lucy refuses to disregard their parents' wishes. John and Cora are buried together in Redbud Hollow, where their children will repeatedly visit their graves.

Detectives Chuck Howard and Phil Musk investigate Thea's impossible knowledge. Musk initially suspects Lucy or Thea could have been involved for the inheritance, prompting Thea to disclose personal information she can obtain from their minds. Howard eventually develops a more trusting relationship with the family. Lucy teaches Thea to imagine mental windows and doors that can be opened or locked, because constant contact with thoughts and memories would be unbearable. She also teaches Thea that the gift should ordinarily be used to help rather than invade or harm. Imprisonment does not end the danger. Thea enters Riggs's cell through psychic contact to confirm that he suffers in confinement, inadvertently deepening their connection. Riggs recognizes another person with an ability like his own and becomes obsessed with the girl who helped imprison him.

Through that connection, Thea discovers Riggs killed other victims before her parents, including murdered couples and a teenage girl. She passes details to Howard and Musk and warns them when Riggs contemplates using information from people's minds to manipulate a guard or attack another prisoner. As he becomes fixated on Thea, Riggs develops headaches, nosebleeds, and other physical consequences from forcing his gift. He nevertheless attacks her through thoughts and dreams, treating her as the only person who can understand his power and the enemy who deprived him of freedom. Thea grows up with Lucy and Rem, supported by uncles Waylon and Caleb and a circle of neighbors and friends. Lucy renovates the attic into the Foxes' Den, where the siblings can study and play games. Thea becomes close to Maddy McKinnon and Gracie, attends local school, and celebrates her sixteenth birthday at a Code Red concert. She develops a lasting crush on the band's singer and songwriter, Tyler Brennan.

At the University of Kentucky, Thea studies game design and begins transforming her long-imagined Endon world into a playable project. She has a painful first relationship with fellow student Asher Billings, who rejects her after she tells him about her psychic abilities and allows others to treat her as a freak or a source of illicit information. She becomes more private. Professor Cheng recognizes her talent and offers to introduce her game to an executive at Milken Entertainment. At almost the same time, Detectives Howard and Musk ask her to help locate Shiloh Durning, a fifteen-year-old abducted by a serial killer. Reading the girl's earrings gives Thea details of the captive, the captor, and the location that enable police to rescue Shiloh and arrest Lawrence James Heberman. The rescue confirms that Thea's gift can save strangers. Opening her mental defenses that far, however, also provides Riggs another opportunity to reach her.

Rem studies business and helps Thea negotiate with Milken when the company wants Endon. Instead of selling the intellectual property outright, they arrange a licensing and development relationship that allows Thea to retain creative interests while building a substantial career. She designs further games, including Endon: Mog's Revenge, with a half-elf warrior named Tye Smith modeled partly on her teenage image of Tyler Brennan. She eventually graduates, works with Milken from Kentucky, and expands her success through multiple games and franchises. Meanwhile Lucy helps the siblings buy ten acres from elderly neighbor Leona, five each. Thea builds a cottage with a professional game-design studio on her share, close to Lucy's land. The continuing link with Riggs remains an unwelcome part of her otherwise independent life.

Three years after Thea moves into her house, Leona dies and leaves her neighboring home to her great-grandson, Tyler Brennan. Thea encounters him arriving with his young son, Braydon, and is astonished to find her old celebrity crush living nearby. Ty was a successful musician with Code Red, but disbanding the group and raising a child changed his life. Bray's mother, Starla, left him in Ty's care while suffering terminal cancer, and Ty became a devoted single father after her death. He initially expects to stay in Kentucky only temporarily. Thea helps him find local services, shares food and visits with Bray, and introduces both to Lucy, Rem, Maddy, and others. Bray quickly loves Thea's Bernese mountain dog, Bunk, and the chickens and other animals. Ty sees in the place a healthier life for his son, and in Thea a person who treats him as a neighbor and father rather than a celebrity.

Thea's feelings for Ty become an opening for Riggs. He enters a dream in which Ty plays music on her porch and then stages the singer's shooting. The killing occurs only in a dream, but Thea experiences the terror as real. On the fifteenth anniversary of the murders, she tells Lucy and Rem about the increasingly intrusive attacks. She decides to counterattack by building a violent, simplified version of a game called Perilous Island inside a shared dream. She pulls Riggs into it, forces him through lethal obstacles while she escapes toward Sanctuary Island, and makes him suffer repeated imagined deaths. He retreats for a while. This encounter does not permanently break the connection and raises further questions about what mental violence can do to a person who experiences it.

As summer proceeds, Thea and Ty grow close through meals, music, work, and looking after Bray. Rem helps assemble a play set; Lucy and Ty make music together; the families share July dinners. Thea and Ty kiss. Ty explains the history of Bray's mother and the intrusions into his private life that left him wary of new relationships. Lucy and Thea also try to support Nadine, a local woman subjected to abuse by her husband Jed, while respecting the dangers she faces in confronting or leaving him. Thea works on a commercial Perilous Island game that Rem tests and that Milken later approves. Ty registers Bray for preschool and begins composing again. In August, Thea and Ty spend their first night together, and Bray happily accepts her presence the following morning. Thea falls in love with both father and son, but still fears telling Ty about her gift.

During another storm dream, Thea deliberately enters Riggs's imagined prison cell to challenge him. She taunts him about his confinement, but he attacks her with a knife. When she awakens she has an actual shallow, bleeding shoulder cut. Neither she nor Lucy can initially explain how a dream wound appeared on her body. Thea admits to Lucy and Rem that she concealed the scale of the conflict and agrees not to enter the cell again. Riggs continues probing at her mental defenses, causing headaches and nausea. Maddy, now a doctor and engaged to Arlo, insists on physical examinations and an MRI, which do not identify a conventional cause. Thea later theorizes that her own complete belief in the psychic attack may have contributed to the wound; the novel does not establish that explanation as a definitive rule. Riggs also stages a dream of a storm destroying Thea's garden, killing her chickens, and threatening Bunk. She awakens at her real kitchen door, but no such destruction has occurred.

Ty records a song during a trip to Philadelphia and considers building a recording studio in Kentucky. Bray starts school and has a fifth birthday party with Thea's family. Ty recognizes that Redbud Hollow has become home. At Halloween, the family celebrates together. A seemingly minor incident then breaks the relationship. Bray cannot find his remote-controlled Grave Digger toy truck. Thea uses her gift without thinking and knows that it is hidden inside an unpacked box of books in Ty's house. Because the box was moved when she was not there, Ty assumes she entered secretly and exploited his son for publicity or money. Previous betrayals in his music career have made him protective and suspicious. He angrily orders her away from Bray and his family. Devastated, Thea is more vulnerable to Riggs, who taunts her with demands to harm herself. She resists and talks with Lucy about her own choice to conceal her powers and Ty's unjustified accusations.

Ty plans to return to Philadelphia, but Bray is miserable at the prospect of losing his school, friends, Bunk, and Thea. After an argument, the five-year-old leaves home alone to seek Thea's comfort. She promptly returns him to Ty. The danger of Bray's disappearance makes Ty realize he cannot uproot his son to escape his own hurt. When Ty goes to return her sweater and demand his house key and the deletion of Bray's photographs, Thea explains that she has no key and intended the photographs as gifts. She finally tells him about her psychic gift, demonstrating knowledge of a musical chord in his mind and an intimate childhood memory. She also recounts her parents' murders through the eyes of Riggs. The discussion and his active psychic intrusion trigger severe distress and a panic episode. Ty begins to understand both her honesty and her vulnerability and apologizes. Their reconciliation is not instantaneous; Thea needs time to trust him again. Ty and Bray send affectionate handmade cards and artwork by way of Bunk, and Lucy invites them to Thanksgiving.

The relationship changes decisively when Nadine arrives at Thea's house terrified because her daughter Adalaide has disappeared following an argument about being allowed to go to school. Using Adalaide's stuffed bear, Thea perceives that the little girl fell asleep under an oak tree near Katie Roster's house. Katie rescues her, and Rem brings Nadine to her daughter. Ty directly witnesses Thea's gift saving a child despite the physical toll it takes and tells her he loves every part of her. She accepts him and reveals that she is devising a final plan against Riggs. She will no longer be content to shut him out temporarily or risk a future daughter inheriting the same danger.

Thea chooses to face Riggs physically at Red Onion State Prison in Virginia while using a psychic game inside his mind. Lucy and Rem fear the risk, especially that she might sacrifice her own gift by using it to destroy someone else's, but understand why she refuses a lifetime of psychic attacks. Ty insists on driving her to the prison. Captain Musk and retired Detective Howard arrange a monitored visit, with an officer inside the room. Thea dresses to resemble her mother on the day Riggs targeted her, wearing Cora's recovered watch and earrings, and carries a key necklace Maddy lends her. Riggs is cuffed and shackled to the interview room, but the physical restraints cannot stop his mental aggression. Thea nevertheless has an advantage he cannot claim: she has chosen to enter and can walk away.

During the interview, Thea pulls Riggs into a sequence of vivid, constructed memories from his life, beginning with childhood animal cruelty and moving through violent encounters with vulnerable people and his earlier home invasions. She forces him to live through alternatives in which she intervenes and he experiences injuries or deaths. Returning to the murder of John and Cora, she shows him that he always chose violence and that she, not he, controls the imaginary world. The episode does not reverse the murders or permit travel through the past. The psychological and psychic exertion makes Riggs bleed from his nose and ears, convulse, and suffer a stroke in the actual prison interview room. Thea describes the result as the destruction of what remains of his mind, the loss of his psychic gift, and his permanent confinement inside an imagined version of his isolation cell. His physical body is not shown to die, and the novel does not provide a later independent medical report. Thea and the narrative nevertheless present the mental imprisonment as lasting, and Riggs can no longer reach her.

Howard and Musk escort the exhausted Thea out, and Ty drives her away. When she fears she has also lost her own psychic abilities, Ty silently thinks of a musical chord; she reads it correctly, confirming the gift remains. He then stops at a quiet playground and plays the song he recorded about her, I See Her. He wants to resume making and recording music, build a studio at Leona's old house, and provide lodging there for visiting musicians. Rather than keep that property as his family's residence, he asks Thea to let him and Bray move into her home and become a family. Bray has already told Ty he wants to live with Thea and Bunk. She accepts and recalls the teenage fantasy in which she and Ty would marry and raise three children. Since Bray will be their first, she asks for two more. Ty agrees. The novel ends with their commitment to a shared family and home, not with an on-page wedding or the births of the additional children. The past has not been changed, but the immediate psychic threat has ended and Thea can choose a future without Riggs's intrusion.