Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE
Cinnamon Haynes can't remember when she stopped wanting things in life. When she was younger, she was filled with longing for silky straight hair that would slide around her shoulders, for bright-white Rollerblades with pink wheels, for her own room where she could paint her walls neon green or orange or whatever color she wanted and have one of those beds with a canopy over it and a slew of pictures in white frames made out of seashells. She would also have photos to put in those frames, pictures of her friends and family. She had none of that.

Perhaps her strongest longing was for her mother to come back from wherever she'd disappeared to when Cinnamon was barely out of diapers, leaving her with her sixty-two-year-old grandmother who passed away three years later. No, her strongest longing was actually for Grandma Thelma to return from the dead and save Cinnamon from everything that came after.

These yearnings used to be a roaring furnace deep within her, hot and constant and consuming. But at some point along the way the fire just burned itself out, slowly, little dying embers one by one, and what was left when the smoke cleared was acceptance: this was, and would always be, the life she got. It was almost liberating because with that resignation came the freedom of surrendering, come what may. It was pointless to pretend that she had any control over her circumstances, better to abandon herself to the current and let it carry her along while maintaining an almost detached curiosity about where she would eventually wash up, which turned out to be here: a pin dot of a town spitting distance from the Atlantic Ocean in a run-down but cozy cottage, listening to her husband snoring like a lawn mower in bed next to her.

Lucky and Cinnamon aren't two words that rightfully belong in the same sentence, but some higher force had a hand somewhere along the way. Because if you'd told her twenty years ago that this future was waiting for her, she would have laughed out loud and asked what you must have been smoking to see this in the cards. The statistics promised a very different trajectory for a girl like her: she was supposed to be alone, homeless, dead, on drugs, or some combination of it all. But somehow-through a rare and brilliant twist of luck, or grace or fate-she'd found herself in this life and let herself settle into it like a warm bath. Granted, it's not like her present circumstances are particularly opulent by any means-it's a little gold band on her ring finger, a roof over her head, and a "real" job at the local community college, with a desk and benefits, where she gets to help kids and maybe make a difference in their lives. Wasn't it something that that could feel like hitting the lottery?

This is why she's constantly reminding herself to have the good sense to appreciate what she has and wish every day that it doesn't get snatched away. Or more specifically, that no one discovers that she doesn't deserve it after all. Good, quiet, grateful. That's her mantra.

So why, then, is she being tormented by the same relentless dream night after night, the one that leaves her shaken and unsettled all day? Here she is now, blinking up at the ceiling, with a hammering heart and beads of sweat frizzing her edges before it's even crossed the sun's mind to make an appearance.

In the dream-nightmare, more accurately-she's riding an elevator in some impossibly high skyscraper in a gleaming, fancy city she's never been to. People get on and off as it climbs until Cinnamon finds herself all alone on the top floor. The doors refuse to open no matter what com