Just A Breath Away

The speed limit on I-70, west of Topeka is seventy five miles per hour; or so the signs said. Kate really didn't pay attention as she navigated the mostly straight highway; she'd stopped caring when she got in the car, at Kansas City. The last time she'd looked at the speedometer was early this morning on her way to work, nearly seventeen hours before. 

Not sticking to the rules. 

"Rules were made to be broken sometimes," she told herself.  

It had worked for Mark. 

Mark was the reason she was in a speeding car heading west to God knows where, with no plan or even a smidgen of care. Actually, when you came down to it, Kate did care. She cared enough to hope that he would contract a terrible disease that would infect his penis and make it rot and fall off. 

Oh, she was praying for that.  

Instead she was sitting in a car driving wildly down a four-lane interstate at eleven o'clock at night at ninety miles per hour.  

Katherine Elizabeth Simpson, Kate for short, is a pediatric nurse in a large hospital in Kansas City, the youngest charge nurse in the hospital at age twenty eight. She was proud of that achievement. It took many hours of study and hard work to get there.  

Dr. Mark McKane met Kate at a Christmas party two years before and they jumped headfirst into a relationship. He was tall, dark haired and dark eyed, with a mysterious air about him that Kate soon discovered was linked to his ability to detach himself from the strain of his work with his patients each day. Not an easy thing to do with juvenile patients. Kate fell in love with him almost immediately and they were engaged after six months, moving in together as they planned for their wedding. She'd found her prince at last. 

Of course, then she'd kissed him and he'd turned into a frog. Kate had always loved that story. 

Not so much now. 

Three weeks before her wedding, she came home from a long day at work to find her darling fiancé tucked up in their bed, cheating on her. Standing in the doorway to the bedroom was enough for Kate to get the idea that he was less than enthusiastic about the upcoming nuptials. So she did the first thing that came to her mind. 

She ran. 

Fast. 

She was a coward; a yellow streaked, lily livered, dyed in the wool coward. If she were a superhero, her special super power would be conflict avoidance. They'd call her the Amazing Evader or something like that. Kate loved superheroes. 

Mark did deserve some credit, however small. Once he'd seen Kate in the doorway, he did try to run after her to explain. He hadn't even bothered to dress.  

Kate had turned her cell phone on silent when she left town, glancing at the names that crossed the screen each time it vibrated. All she ever saw was Mark's name scrolling over and over until finally, her older sister's name appeared.  

Janice Simpson Cross was one of the most sought-after family attorneys in the state of Kansas. With a biting wit, high intelligence and enough charisma to talk a cobra into biting its charmer, she also had an uncanny way of telling if a person was telling the truth and even how much of the truth. Kate could never put anything over on her beloved sister, so she had stopped trying years ago. Jan was better than a mother to Kate, being the only family left after the deaths of their parents when she was seventeen and Jan was twenty. Right now, she was all Kate had. She pressed the red button and put Jan on speaker. 

"Kate? Honey, what's happened? Where are you?" Jan's voice was full of worry and fear.  

"Driving," Kate answered flatly, trying hard to mask the emotions that threatened to burst to the surface.