All the Little Pieces. Jilliane Hoffman

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      Faith Saunders felt her eyelids start to slip closed and she slapped herself hard across the cheek. Then she lowered the SUV’s window and stuck her face out into the rain. She had to stay awake. She had to. It was midnight and she still had a ways to go. Stopping was not an option. Not out here. There was no place to stop.

      She dried her face with the beach towel she’d found in the back of the Explorer before wiping the fog from the inside of the windshield. On top of all that had gone wrong tonight – and there was plenty – the AC and defroster had stopped working, thanks to the humungous puddle, a.k.a. lake, she hadn’t seen when she tore out of her sister’s development back in Sebring. She sat up straight, stretched her back and leaned on the steering wheel, trying to concentrate through the exhaustion and pounding headache that had been building behind her eyes. Outside it looked the same as it had since she’d left Charity’s – wet and flat and black. Endlessly black. It had been at least a half-hour since she’d seen another car on the road.

      On its way to wreak havoc on Texas, late-season Tropical Storm Octavius had stalled over a sizable chunk of the Sunshine State, making life miserable for the past two days for everyone in Central and South Florida. Faith had grown up in Miami, and in her thirty-two years she’d seen her share of bad weather and hurricanes – usually they blew in, took down a few trees and power lines and blew out. But Octavius wasn’t playing by the script: the storm was expected to continue thrashing the state with rain and fifty-mile-an-hour wind gusts for at least one more day. Most people were smart and had heeded warnings to stay indoors and off the roads.

      Most people.

      Faith chewed on her lip. She wasn’t sure she was lost, she just didn’t know exactly where she was. She was supposed to be on State Road 441, only this didn’t look like the 441 she’d taken up to her sister’s that afternoon. Of course, she’d driven up to Charity’s in the daylight, and with no streetlights, gas stations, restaurants, motels or landmarks to help guide her, everything looked different in the dark. Out here there was nothing but acre after acre of farmland and for the last umpteen miles, stretches of sugar cane fields, their bushy, imposing stalks looming menacingly over both sides of the roadway. This was Central Florida, and outside the urban vortex of Orlando and the 140,000-room hotelopolis of Disney, Universal and SeaWorld, the middle of the state didn’t offer much more than a handful of small towns, rural farmland, Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades. If you were headed south, like she was, it wasn’t until you hit Palm Beach County that you’d start to see life and lights and buildings taller than two stories. The further south and east, the brighter the lights and taller the buildings until you finally hit the neon glow and towering skyscrapers of Miami, where there were sure to be bars open and people out and about, even at midnight and even in a tropical storm. But Faith wasn’t in Miami. She was far from it, still way out somewhere in the boonies, trying to get home, trying to stay awake, and trying to forget all the horrible reasons why she was out here on such a horrible night in the first place.

      A blinding streak of lightning cut across the sky right in front of her and she sucked in a breath. Her eyes darted to the rearview, to where Maggie, her four-year-old, was asleep in her booster, a thumb in her mouth, her other hand clutching a well-worn, stuffed Eeyore. Faith counted off the seconds in her head. When the boom of thunder came, it was so loud and so intense that she could actually feel it roll through the car. She stiffened, staring at the mirror, bracing for the fallout. Having had to unexpectedly leave her cousins’ house had triggered one of Maggie’s inconsolable, crazy tantrums and she’d spent the first forty-five minutes of the drive home screaming, crying, and kicking at the back of the passenger seat, finally falling asleep from pure exhaustion. Faith watched as she sucked her thumb harder, her tiny, slender fingers clutching at her freckled nose, her long blonde eyelashes fluttering, threatening to pop open.

      She carefully exhaled the breath she’d been holding, reached behind her with one hand and gently rubbed Maggie’s exposed bony knee. The two-sizes-too-big pink cowboy boot that had been precariously dangling off the edge of her toes fell to the floorboard СКАЧАТЬ