Sweet Fortune

arm.
    “Jessie,” Lilian said quickly, “think about this. You've been unsure of your feelings for Hatch all along. Don't rush into anything now. Give yourself time. Consider all the ramifications. You don't know what Hatch's motives are in all this. He might think he can use you against Vincent somehow.”
    “No. He's not going to use me. He loves me.” Jessie smiled. “For myself, not because I'm useful. If anything, I've probably caused Hatch more trouble than anyone he's ever run into before in his entire life.”
    “What are you talking about?” Lilian demanded.
    “Look at it from his point of view, Mom. I dragged him into a crazy adventure. He nearly got killed because of me. He's lost his chance to make Benedict Fasteners the cornerstone of the empire he'd planned to build when he decided to rescue me from my role in the family. And now he's going to be more or less starting over financially because of me.”
    “You're looking at this from a skewed perspective.”
    “I'm not so sure about that.” Jessie went to the door and paused, her hand on the knob. “When you think about it, he's really given me one heck of a courtship, hasn't he? Obviously the man is in love.”
    “Jessie, we're just asking you to be reasonable about this,” Lilian cut in swiftly. “What if Vincent is mad enough to sell out? Even if he doesn't, we all know the company needs to be modernized if it's to stay competitive, and Vincent can't do it. The chance to turn Benedict Fasteners into a corporate giant is too important to let slip away.”
    “You'd need Hatch to do it, and Dad fired Hatch,” Jessie reminded her.
    “But you could fix it, dammit.” Constance threw up her hands in exasperation. “You can deal with Vincent. Get him to see reason. Get Hatch to see reason.”
    “Dad would make Hatch crawl.”
    “It's called compromise, dammit.” Constance shouted.
    “It's called pride,” Jessie said. “If Dad and Hatch are ever going to find a way to work together, one of them will have to back down. And I can tell you right now, it won't be Hatch.”
    “You know it won't be Vincent,” Lilian warned.
    Jessie nodded. She knew her father as well as anyone. “I know. Oh, by the way, you're both invited to the engagement party on Friday evening.”
    “You can't really expect us to help you celebrate this fiasco of an engagement, Jessie,” Constance muttered.
    Lilian frowned at her daughter. “Go home and think it over, Jessie. Think it over very carefully. You don't want to abandon your family for a man who is so unreasonable he'll walk out on a multimillion-dollar future.”

    Things felt a little eerie, Jessie thought later as she parked her car in front of her apartment building and got out. She had the oddest sensation of impending disaster again, rather like the feeling she'd had about the Attwood case.
    It was probably caused by the array of changes she was confronting in her life. After all, a great deal had happened at once. She had been fired from a job she had really thought was going to work out. She had gotten engaged to be married. She had become the cause of a lot of serious tension in the family, when normally she was the one who smoothed things over for everyone.
    Her life was undergoing a tremendous upheaval, she reminded herself. It was probably normal to feel vaguely uneasy and perhaps even threatened. She reached into the backseat for the two sacks of groceries she had just bought at the supermarket. Grasping one in each arm, she backed out of the car.
    Jessie heard the roar of the suddenly accelerating engine just as she closed the car door. Automatically she glanced to the right to look down the normally quiet street.
    The dark brown car was no more than a few yards away, still accelerating rapidly. It was coming straight toward her.
    Jessie screamed and dropped the two sacks of groceries. In a split-second calculation she realized she could never make it across the street in time.
    She did the only thing she could do. She pressed herself flat against the side of her own car, praying the driver would at least see and try to avoid the vehicle, even if he had not seen her.
    The brown car whooshed past so close that Jessie's purse caught on the fender. The bag sailed into the air and landed yards away. She felt a rush of wind sucking at her, got a glimpse of windows tinted so dark it was impossible to see the driver, and then it was all over.
    All over and she was still in one piece.