LITMIR.BIZ

      In her little German sports car some minutes and a minor traffic jam later, Cassidy sat in the parking lot and stared up at her apartment building. She’d thought of it as a haven not five minutes earlier. Now its white facade looked cold. Empty. And she knew the inside of her own apartment would be even worse. Gray and depressing. She couldn’t make herself get out of her car.

      Her stomach started to burn again, so she grabbed the roll of antacids that she always had sitting on the console and popped one in her mouth. She looked at the roll. Really looked at it this time. She’d stopped last night on the way home to buy it. It was nearly gone. How could that be?

      Rubbing the heel of her hand where her stomach constantly stung, Cassidy remembered her doctor’s diagnosis of an ulcer. He’d prescribed medication just last week. Cassidy had never taken the time to fill the prescription. Apparently he was right. She really did need it.

      Half an hour later, a prescription bottle and a new roll of antacids on her passenger seat, Cassidy started her car and wondered what to do next. Her grandfather had beeped her no less than ten times since she’d left his office. Her beeper was now turned off, as was her cell phone. She picked them both up off the passenger seat and glared at them. Sometimes these well-touted modern conveniences felt more like a pair of handcuffs chaining her to Jamison Steel.

      But right now she was on vacation.

      Without ceremony she tossed the offending technology into the backseat and determinedly put them and the company out of her mind.

      For the first time since her childhood when she woke up with her grandfather sitting at her bedside in a Colorado hospital, she had no one planning her next step in life. No. This next move was all her own to make.

      Rather than feeling free, Cassidy felt suddenly very alone. With her grandfather out of the equation, she had no one to rely on. He was all she had. Her friends were really more acquaintances, and most of them, save a neighbor or two, worked at Jamison.

      She looked at herself in the rearview mirror, narrowing her blue eyes. When had she gotten so drawn looking? She fussed with her short, straight, blond hair for a second and bit her full bottom lip. What do you want, Cassidy Jamison? Where do you want to go?

      “I want to get away from the rat race,” she said aloud to the near-stranger in the mirror. “I need time to just think.”

      A penny winked up at her from next to the nearly empty antacid roll in the console. She remembered a scene from a book she’d read several years earlier. The hero had flipped a coin—a penny—and had driven toward his uncertain future, giving the coin the power he no longer felt over his life. At each crossroad, he’d let the penny send him wherever it chose. Right then, feeling adrift, she felt an acute kinship with that character and decided her discarded penny just might know more than she did about her life’s choices.

      She picked it up, turned it over in her hand and stared down at old Abe Lincoln’s coppery visage. Above his head were words she’d seen all her life and never really read. In God we trust.

      Cassidy wondered suddenly if there was a God. She remembered vaguely her parents talking about Him. But God hadn’t been part of her upbringing under her grandfather’s rule. Recalling her father’s calm, easy smile, she wondered if maybe that was part of her problem. She flipped the coin. Caught it. Slapped it down on the back of her hand. “If You’re up there, God, send me where I need to go. Heads north, tails south,” she called, then peeked. Honest Abe stared up at her again. “North,” she said, then wondered once again if she or some higher power had control of her destiny.