Chapter 12
And One Week More
Jessica’s VW Beetle made it over Maxine Pass without too many complaints. It had been a hard three-day drive from Chicago, crossing the endless expanse of the Great Plains, through the heart of the Colorado, Wyoming and Utah Rockies before turning northwest into Oregon. But she could practically coast from here.
The car felt as if it knew the way. Somewhere in the last two weeks since Mom’s wedding the control of her future had slipped out of her hands—or at least any future she had recognized.
She’d slept for most of the flight back from Portland to Chicago, only remembering Marjorie Winslow’s envelope an hour before landing at O’Hare. There were only a half dozen pages; the first page was a hand-written letter on lined yellow paper:
My dearest Jessica,
