The blue eyes in the reflection were red-rimmed, but not because of remorse. If she had the chance to do it all over again, to right that wrong . . . she bit her lip and pushed the thought out of her mind as her car struggled against the incline. She wasn’t a bad person. Not really. And James . . . Oh, dear God, James . . .

A lump filled her throat as the Corolla nosed upward, snow now covering the pavement and piling along the sides of the road where the plow had come through earlier. She fiddled with the defrost knob, as the windshield was beginning to fog, and cranked the temperature to the highest level.

Nothing.

The fan was broken. Had been for weeks.

“Shit.” She grabbed a used napkin from the coffee shop, which had been wedged into a cup holder. Lump in her throat, she swiped away the film as best she could, then she squinted through the windshield.

What little traffic there had been had thinned, and finally, as the car climbed, engine whining, she found herself alone on this stretch of road winding through the night-dark peaks of the Cascades. She pressed harder on the gas. “Come on. Come on.” Visibility was hampered by the ever-increasing snowfall and, of course, the useless defroster. Once more, she wiped a spot clear above her steering wheel to see that now, in the mountains, the snowstorm was nearly a whiteout.

“Great.”

She thought of James, and her heart crumbled. A wash of memories slipped through her mind, and tears threatened again. She hit the gas at the next sharp turn.

Her wheels shifted.

Spun.

She eased off. “Get a grip,” she told herself as the car straightened out, the beams of her headlights reflecting in a million swirling flakes, the engine lugging down with the steep incline.

Their last fight had been their worst. Never before had anger and nasty words turned physical, but tonight her rage had been mercurial.

More tears.

Blinding her, just as rage had blinded her earlier.

Shaking her head against the memory, she floored the accelerator, snagged the wet, wadded napkin, and took another swipe at the fogged windshield as the road dipped suddenly.

“Crap!”

Her heart froze.

Another corner loomed, this one hairpin sharp.

Automatically, she hit the brakes.

The back tires spun as she turned the steering wheel with her free hand.

The Corolla hit ice and began a slow, steady swirl.

“No . . . no, no, no!” She was high in the mountains, the tops of eighty-foot fir trees level with the road, their icy branches laden with snow, the canyon below invisible. “Oh, God.” She took her foot off both the brake and the gas . . . that was what she was supposed to do. Right? Drive into the spin or some such thing? Her heart pounded in her ears.

In slow motion, she saw the edge of the road, the piles of snow hiding the guard rail, if there was one, and beyond, the darkness.