Now all she wanted was to go home.

She knew she should pull off again, should try to catch another quick nap before pressing onward, but she was so close, only a hundred miles from Boston. At the last Dunkin Donuts, she'd tanked up on three more cups of coffee. That had helped, a little; it had given her just enough of a buzz to get her from Springfield to Sturbridge. Now the caffeine was starting to wear off, and even though she thought she was awake, every so often her head would dip in a sharp bob, and she knew she'd fallen asleep, if only for a second.

A Burger King sign beckoned from the darkness ahead. She pulled off the highway.

Inside she ordered coffee and a blueberry muffin and sat down at a table. At this hour of night, there were only a few patrons in the dining room, all of them wearing the same pasty masks of exhaustion. Highway ghosts, thought Karen. The same tired souls who seemed to haunt every highway rest stop. It was eerily quiet in that dining room, everyone focused on trying to stay awake and get back on the road.

At the next table sat a depressed-looking woman with two small children, both of them quietly chewing on cookies. Those children, so well behaved, so blond, made Karen think of her own daughters. It was their birthday tomorrow. Tonight, asleep in their beds, she thought, they are only a day away from being thirteen. A day further from their childhood.

When you wake up, she thought, I'll be home.

She refilled her coffee cup, snapped on a plastic cover, and walked out to her car.

Her head felt clear now. She could make it. An hour, fifty miles, and she'd be walking in her front door. She started the engine and pulled out of the parking lot. A hundred miles, she thought. Only a hundred miles.