Chapter 2
Birthday Girl
Penny Sinclair awoke the morning of her fourteenth birthday with tears on her cheeks and the feeling that she’d fallen back in time, all the way to when she’d last seen her mom out the door of their apartment in San Francisco to her taxi ride out of Penny’s life. It was to have been a one-and-a-half-hour flight to Los Angeles. Diana Sinclair never returned. Her company’s jet had lost its engines and fallen out of the sky, crashing into the ocean just in sight of LA. With no other living relatives, Penny had ended up in a children’s home in San Francisco before her mother’s old friend and her godmother, Susan Taylor, brought her to the small town of Dogwood, Washington.
Penny had dreamed about that day a lot in the past few weeks.
The one-year anniversary of h
