The black sedan began to die at the worst possible moment, on a highway shoulder glazed with freezing rain, less than twenty minutes before Victoria Caine was supposed to close the largest business deal of her life.
First came a warning light, a small amber symbol she might ordinarily have dismissed until the next scheduled service.
Then a second warning appeared, the engine lost power, and the temperature indicator climbed with a speed that made her stomach tighten. She guided the car away from the moving lanes while tractor-trailers swept past, throwing curtains of dirty water against her windows.
By the time the engine stopped, the sky had darkened to the color of wet slate. The windshield wipers kept dragging themselves across glass that was beginning to crust at the edges with ice. Victoria held her phone against her ear while a roadside assistance representative explained, with infuriating politeness, that conditions had delayed the nearest available truck. An hour was the optimistic estimate, the woman said, and possibly longer if another accident closed the interstate.
Victoria looked at the clock on her dashboard and did the calculation again, although she already knew the answer. The meeting in downtown Columbus would begin in nineteen minutes, and the partners on the other side of the table had flown in from three cities for a signature that had taken eleven months to negotiate. Her chief operating officer had the documents, the lawyers had approved every revision, and an entire expansion schedule depended on tonight's agreement. None of them could sign for Victoria without reopening the approvals, and Victoria was sitting in a disabled car with rain tapping hard enough to sound like handfuls of gravel.
She thanked the representative, ended the call, and watched her remaining battery indicator drop to four percent. A charging cable was in the center console, but the car's electrical system had begun shutting down accessories to protect itself. She called her assistant and heard the connection break halfway through a sentence. When the screen went dark a moment later, the sudden quiet inside the car was worse than the rain.
Victoria Caine was forty-six years old, founder and chief executive officer of Caine Mobility, and accustomed to being able to solve most emergencies by knowing the right person to call. Her company developed transportation software and managed service vehicles for commercial customers across the Midwest. Investors described her as disciplined, unsentimental, and exceptionally difficult to surprise. On that stretch of highway, with the engine cooling and her expensive coat doing nothing to stop the cold, she discovered how little any of those descriptions mattered.
She got out to examine the hood because remaining in the car with passing traffic so close felt unbearable. Immediately, wind drove cold rain beneath her collar and across her face. She had forgotten the hooded raincoat that normally lived behind her office door, and the