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Chapter 45

Janna stood on the balcony of her apartment, staring down at the patio far below. In the daylight, the bed of concrete and stone was far too beautiful to do what she planned to do—with its surrounding borders of hostas and river birches and with the little black fountain in the very center, it looked like a little Garden of Eden. Had she decided to jump in daylight, she would have left a dreadful mess.

But in the blackness of the storm, the concrete was a pale flatness, amoeba-shaped, almost indistinguishable from the surrounding beds of plantings. She wouldn't have to think about her blood on the aggregate, because the pounding rain would wash away the blood. Wash away her mistakes. Wash away the future that she'd sold out from under herself. She'd take the quick road to Hell, and skip a lifetime of looking like a great success and feeling like a bitter failure.

She held the contract in her left hand, crumpled. When someone found her body, he'd find the contract with it, and people would know why she'd done what she'd done. She wasn't worried that the contract would be destroyed by the weather. The rain left Hell's paper untouched. It didn't get soggy or sodden, the letters didn't run, the corners didn't curl. That didn't surprise her. She figured if she had thrown it into a fire, it probably wouldn't have burned either.

Pity the makers of envelopes couldn't get the formula, she thought. The post office had creamed enough of her mail that she figured nothing but Hell-proof paper would get through unscathed.

Similar environments. Similar bureaucracies.

She climbed onto the white cast-iron lawn chair she kept on her balcony and stared down into the darkness. She only stood a couple feet higher than she had before, but suddenly she felt dizzy. That would pass.

She smiled a hopeless smile. So would everything else.

The wind gusted past her, buffeting her. She eyed the poured-concrete railing and swallowed. The top of the railing was about six inches wide, and the whole thing was sturdy. Still, she hesitated. The wind would make standing on that railing precarious—and she intended to jump, but she did not wish to fall. She wanted some control over the last moments of her life.

She braced both hands on the railing at the corner and scooted one leg up onto it. Then the other. The rain soaked through her clothes, stuck her hair to her face, stung her skin like a shower of BBs. It blew first left, then right, then left again as the wind shifted its patterns around the apartment building and found different routes through the complex. Lightning illuminated her target, then left her in darkness blacker than before, with afterimages of the ground below her etched in blue, white and black on her eyes.

When she could see again, she tightened her grip on the contract that stole from her everything she'd worked for, and slowly began to stand.

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Framed