Night Passage — Annie Reed

For Joleen, a single mom, a middle of the night drive from Las Vegas to Reno with her angry, rebellious teenage daughter turns perilous when a tire blows on her old car, stranding Joleen and her daughter, Casey, alone on the two-lane desert highway, miles from civilization.

Joleen knows how to change the tire, but she can't do it by herself, not anymore, thanks to the secret she's been hiding from her daughter. The last thing Casey wants to do is help the mom who packed all of their belongings in the car and uprooted them both from the only home Casey's ever known.

Night Passage is the story of two women, one middle-aged and facing an uncertain future and one on the brink of adulthood trying to flex her wings, learning to let go of the preconceptions of the past and trust each other enough to build a new future.

Annie Reed is a prolific short story writer whose fiction has been published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine as well as in numerous anthologies from Daw and Pocket Books. Annie can be found on the web at www.annie-reed.com.