The car clock claimed it was three in the afternoon, but it might as well have been midnight. Black-cheeked clouds kept rolling in low. The wipers could barely keep up with the slashing, bashing snow. Drifts were forming fast, making big, fat white pillows on fence posts and roofs-but where the wind swept the roads clean, the surface was slick ice.

Exhausted or not, she simply couldn’t relax. Not yet.

Ten minutes from home-even though Daisy hadn’t considered the Campbell homestead to be her real home for more than a decade-her body seemed to sense the ordeal was almost over. She couldn’t see Firefly Hollow, where every teenager in the county traditionally made out on Saturday night, but she knew it was there. She couldn’t see Old Man Swisher’s pond, either, but growing up, she’d spent so many hours in the neighbor’s swimming hole that she knew where it was from the curve in the road. A huge, lioness of a yawn escaped her lungs. Less than a half mile, she’d be home free and safe.

Only, right then, a hundred yards from the driveway, the compact found another diamond slide of ice. It was like trying to control a bullet. She did all the things she was supposed to do, but the little rental car went with the spin, then dove, nose first, into a ditch.

The back tires were still spinning when Daisy let out a long, furious blood-curdling scream.

There were times for impulse control-and times when a woman was justifiably fed-up, ticked-off, had-it, and every other multiple-guess choice there could possibly be.

She turned off the damn car, grabbed her damn purse and overnight bag, and then wrenched open the damn door. Her elegant Italian boots promptly sank into two-foot-deep snow. Naturally she fell. Abandoning all pride, she clawed and crawled her way up from the damn ditch to the damn road.

In that brief period of time, her toes and nose froze solid. Her red cashmere coat and fuzzy hat were designer French; her bags and gloves were Swiss. She’d have traded all of it-including her Manolo Blahnik boots-for a practical L.L. Bean jacket. The kind she grew up in. The kind she swore she’d never wear again as long as she lived.