Beneath a Southern Sky - Deborah Raney
Prologue
A chill spring rain washed the Kansas Turnpike, and the angry grey skies overhead offered no hope for an end to the downpour. It seemed to Daria that hers was the only car on this lonely stretch of highway. The deserted road seemed a fitting metaphor for what her life had become. She passed the Emporia exit and shifted in her seat, settling in for the long haul. She’d been on the road for well over an hour, and her destination was still more than two hours away. Was two hours long enough to decide what she would do when she got there? Was a lifetime long enough?
She took her hands off the wheel and rubbed away the beginnings of a headache. As she turned her head from side to side, trying to ease the taut muscles in her neck, her eyes fell on the yellow piece of paper that lay on the passenger seat beside her. In this world of fax machines and e-mail, she hadn’t realized that people still sent telegrams. And yet it seemed appropriate somehow. She couldn’t imagine news such as this 8 ?-by-11-inch sheet of paper held coming any other way. Daria turned her eyes back to the road. She didn’t need to read the telegram again. She had it memorized. But committing the tersely worded message to memory didn’t answer the heartrending question it begged.
Barely forty-eight hours ago she had thought she was the happiest woman alive. But nineteen words on one thin yellow sheet of paper had changed everything, and now the reality of her dilemma nearly took her breath away. How did a woman choose between two men she had always loved with all her heart?
The relentless drumming of the rain on her windshield and the incessant rhythm of the wipers carried her back to another time, to another rain, and bid her to walk the paths of memory one more time. And like the silver ribbon of highway that curled ahead, the past three years of Daria’s life spooled out before her.