One Breath Away. Heather Gudenkauf

      For Alex, Anna and Grace

       ~My three wishes

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      As always, enormous gratitude goes to my agent, Marianne Merola, for her wisdom, guidance, attention to detail and her friendship. Thanks also to Henry Thayer for his behind-the-scenes support.

      A thousand thanks to my editor, Miranda Indrigo, whose insights and suggestions are always spot on. Thanks also to all the folks at HQ—especially Margaret O’Neil Marbury and Valerie Gray. I’m so proud to call HQ my home.

      Thank you to John and Kathy Conway and Howard and Shirley Bohr for opening up their homes and farms to me as I researched the novel. I always enjoy our time together.

      Much appreciation goes to Mark Dalsing, whose advice in regard to police procedure and his early readings of the manuscript were invaluable.

      A heartfelt thank-you goes out to my parents, Milton and Patricia Schmida, my brothers and sisters and their families, for their generous support and enthusiasm.

      Much love and thanks to Scott, Alex, Anna and Grace—I couldn’t do it without you.

      Holly

      I’m in that lovely space between consciousness and sleep. I feel no pain thanks to the morphine pump and I can almost believe that the muscles, tendons and skin of my left arm have knitted themselves back together, leaving my skin smooth and pale. My curly brown hair once again falls softly down my back, my favorite earrings dangle from my ears and I can lift both sides of my mouth in a wide smile without much pain at the thought of my children. Yes, drugs are a wonderful thing. But the problem is that while the carefully prescribed and doled-out narcotics by the nurses wonderfully dull the edges of this nightmare, I know that soon enough this woozy, pleasant feeling will fall away and all that I will be left with is pain and the knowledge that Augie and P.J. are thousands of miles away from me. Sent away to the place where I grew up, the town I swore I would never return to, the house I swore I would never again step into, to the man I never wanted them to meet.

      The tinny melody of the ringtone that Augie, my thirteen-year-old daughter, programmed into my cell phone is pulling me from my sleep. I open one eye, the one that isn’t covered with a thick ointment and crusted shut, and call out for my mother, who must have stepped out of the room. I reach for the phone that is sitting on the tray table at the side of my bed and the nerve endings in my bandaged left arm scream in protest at the movement. I carefully shift my body to pick up the phone with my good hand and press the phone to my remaining ear.

      “Hello.” The word comes out half-formed, breathless and scratchy, as if my lungs were still filled with smoke.

      “Mom?” Augie’s voice is quavery, unsure. Not sounding like my daughter at all. Augie is confident, smart, a take-charge, no one is ever going to walk all over me kind of girl.

      “Augie? What’s the matter?” I try to blink the fuzziness of the morphine away; my tongue is dry and sticks to the roof of my mouth. I want to take a sip of water from the glass sitting on my tray, but my one working hand holds the phone. The other lies useless at my side. “Are you okay? Where are you?”

      There are a few seconds of quiet and then Augie continues. “I love you, Mom,” she says in a whisper that ends in quiet sobs.

      I sit up straight