He almost drove past her. It was 10:30 at night, raining hard on Route 9, and Marcus Cole had no space left in his life for anybody else’s disaster. He was 43, recently divorced, running on four hours of sleep, with a frozen pizza waiting at home and a nine-year-old daughter already calling to ask when he’d be back.
The rain had started before dark and never once let up. By ten-thirty that Friday night, it was coming down in hard silver sheets, rattling against windshields, flattening the hedges along Route 9, turning every parking lot into a blurred mirror of gas station lights and traffic signals. The kind of rain that made sensible…
