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dated were dysfunctional in some way. Troy Calloway was her most recent nightmare. Peyton had just graduated from college when he asked her out. She had only one date with him, but in his gin-soaked mind that meant they were a couple. It was a horrible evening. She shivered thinking about it. He took her to a lovely restaurant with white linens and soft candlelight, but after several cocktails and a bottle of wine, Troy began to slur his words. As the dinner progressed he talked louder and louder. The man was a raging alcoholic, and, yes, apparently she and her mother, who introduced her to Troy and encouraged her to go out with him because he was such a nice churchgoing gentleman, were the only two people in Brentwood who didn’t know he was a drunk. A mean drunk at that.
    Troy was as relentless as an Amway salesman in his pursuit. The phone calls would start around five in the evening and go on through the night. By two in the morning, he would be screaming into her voice mail threatening all sorts of vile things. Some made sense; others didn’t. The following afternoon he would call and apologize, and when she didn’t respond, the cycle would start all over again. She blocked his number, but that didn’t help. He simply called her from another phone. Fortunately, the grant to study in France came through, and the timing couldn’t have been better. She spent those glorious months in Lyon, and when she returned home and didn’t hear from Troy again, she assumed he had forgotten all about her and had moved on . . . hopefully into rehab.
    Her dating life really was laughable, she thought. It was a good thing she wasn’t looking for love. Her last thought before she fell asleep was that she would be just fine without it.
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    Because of the weather it took more than two days to get to Dalton. The last day was harrowing. About forty miles from her destination she drove into a blizzard. The weatherman on the radio insisted there would be a few light flurries stirred up by high winds. The man obviously hadn’t bothered to look out the window.
    She had driven in snow but never like this. It was thick and heavy and stuck to her windshield in between swipes of her wipers. She decided she would take the next exit and find a place to wait out the storm. Visibility near zero, she could barely keep the car on the road. She had a death grip on the steering wheel and, when she hit a patch of ice and went into a spin, she tried to remember what her father had told her. Slamming on the brakes, though an automatic response, was definitely not the thing to do. She spun around and around so many times she lost count, narrowly missing a steep drop into a deep ravine before miraculously ending up back in her own lane—facing the wrong way but still in her lane. Thankfully, she was the only car on the isolated stretch of highway.
    As it turned out, the next exit that offered any promise was the one to Dalton, and by then the snow and the wind had died down. She reached Dalton around four in the afternoon. She drove through a neighborhood and was surprised by how flat the area was. Street after street of tract housing, each home painted a pastel color. Everything around them looked clean and white, but then the snow blanketed the town. She didn’t think it would look so pretty when it thawed. There weren’t any trees. The terrain was barren, as though someone had bulldozed the land before slapping up one prefab house after another. They were all ranches, too. There wasn’t any individuality and it was a little depressing. Maybe the other side of town was more interesting, she thought. Curious to find out, she continued to drive down the main street until she realized there wasn’t any other side of town. All the restaurants, gas stations, grocery stores—there were two—were clustered together with the fast-food drive-throughs and three small apartment buildings. It wouldn’t take Peyton any time at all to know where