She flexed her hand slightly and the explosions inside her nerve endings almost made her faint. The motion detector from the porch clicked on, bathing the sides of the house in light, long shadows reaching toward her.
Donna heard a hushed voice say “s**t,” and quick footfalls tapping down the cracked sidewalk.
Donna walked toward the front, but the footfalls stopped and there was no movement down the barely lit street. She stayed within the shadows, moving as quietly as she could and waited for her visitor to be exposed. The person couldn’t have gone too far. There had been no sound of a car’s ignition, and the number of footsteps that she’d heard couldn’t have taken whoever it was more than halfway down the street.
Donna sat on the wet grass and waited. The porch itself hid her from th
