Chapter 1

The sky was still dark, as it was every morning when Joanna Harrison began walking the two-mile route that serpentine through the development where she lived. The icy air hit her face, the only part of her uncovered, numbing her skin to a dull ache as she walked past massive houses majestically situated on two-acre lots. But unlike other mornings, she wasn’t thinking about her day at work, errands afterward, or her children thousands of miles away. She was seeing the weeks unfolding before her in her mind, and she shuddered, not from the cold, but because she knew everything was about to change. And she simply couldn’t do it again.

She’d never been a fighter. Years ago, Joanna had learned it was better to keep her feelings under control. And resentments? Well, growing up in her mother’s house, she’d discovered how to keep them buried deep inside. The only problem she found was the occasional bout of breathlessness as something vague or long forgotten seemed to bubble to the surface, like a voice struggling to be heard. As it did on that bitter morning in March. Just before dawn, as her sneakers hit the ground again and again with a soft crunching of frozen, dead leaves, following a routine she’d clung to like a lifeline, that voice rose to the edge of Joanna Harrison’s consciousness like the quiet crackling of lake ice about to thaw.

Leave.

Pumping her arms, she picked up the pace, her sleep-stiff muscles finally warming up. She stopped briefly, bending her left leg a few times until the knee clicked into place. A little arthritis, the harbinger of middle age. She thought of Sharon and how they would have laughed over this. Sharon was the only real friend she’d made when they moved to New Jersey three years ago. They had jokingly referred to each other as their “surrogate spouses,” going to soccer games and movies together, more married to their careers, traveled the country. Months ago Sharon had relocated to Texas. She missed her terribly.

The sun was just peeking over the barren hills to the east as she left the sidewalk and headed into the wooded trail that looped behind the houses. Within moments, pale winter sunlight flickered, illuminating the bare trees and the snow-splotched fields in the distance. A glimmer of something ignited inside of Joanna. It had been days since she’d seen the sun, and she could not recall a winter as bitter or endless as this one.

The first snow had come before Halloween, a brief flash of white that was gone within hours as the warm earth soaked it up. By Christmas, life as she knew it had come to a virtual standstill under the weight of nearly thirty inches of powder. She’d stood at the picture window, the cordless phone in her hand, waiting to hear from her children, stranded at different airports. The holiday she’d waited for was cut to a frantic forty-eight-hour visit, as Sarah and Tim rushed back to their own busy lives.