Prologue

Everything hinges on a moment.

Make a split-second decision or submit to a whim . . . and like tumbling dominoes, events will follow, good and bad. In a perfect world, if you make a decision with the best of intentions, only the best of results may come. But sometimes, bad people do the right thing. Sometimes good people do the wrong thing.

You might say a pen led to my death.

Just a simple pen, it sat, not on my desk, but on the kitchen counter, where I abandoned it after scribbling the word “tomatoes” on my grocery list. Sometime before making its way to that spot, it lay on my nightstand, where I set it down after devising a plan to reunite my three daughters. From there, it traveled to my office, where I penned a last codicil to my will. The guilty ruminations of an old woman, mostly. But then, I forgot . . . until I saw the pen and set in motion the chain of dominoes that brought me to this moment....

Only now, one breath shy of my last, do I understand that maybe this began long ago . . . in another moment . . . on a beach north of Folly....