Free The Baker's Wife by Erin Healy Page B

to get her up and over into safety, gracelessly as ever. She fell onto her side, her fleshy cheek imprinted by the metal grid of the platform. The backpack shifted.
    She heard a tumbling, and a clatter, and got onto hands and knees in time to see the liner-wrapped phone shoot out between two of the bars, chased by The God of Small Things . Diane grasped for the backpack behind her to keep the money from falling out too.
    A Dumpster beneath the balcony received the phone, barely catching it at the front corner beside a flour sack recycled as a trash bag. The noise startled the tabby cat, who was nosing around the bakery’s back door. He made a four-pawed jump to dodge the book, which bounced off the rim of the bin and slapped closed where he’d been standing.
    Diane stared, trying to assess what her separation from these two items might mean and whether she needed to get them back. No one knew the book was hers. It didn’t even have her name in it. If the phone were discovered, though, Geoff and Audrey would know that it had been in her possession. The Dumpster outside the bakery was the worst possible place for that to have ended up.
    Worst for whom? For the Bofingers, not for her. She was merely an innocent bystander. They were the parties who were truly involved in the mess on the intersection. Should she care about that? On some level, some selfish level, she had to. She needed the Bofingers to be her friends, so she would try to remedy the latest problem she’d created as soon as she could. In the meantime, she’d focus on this window, which led into the room she and Donna had shared as children. It was an old wood window with so much dry rot in the sash that the lock had fallen out of it, yet one more convenience for Donna’s adolescent comings and goings. Their parents had never felt the urgency to replace the lock, considering the window’s location.
    The morning traffic rose in volume on the street. She heard conversations and police radios.
    Donna lifted her fingers to the screen.
    She groaned.
    This window never had a screen, this . . . vinyl window . . . these sliding panes . . . with not one but two locks.
    God, will you never answer any prayer that I have ever prayed? Will you never make a way for me to undo the things I wish I’d never done? Are you so heartless that you’ll keep sabotaging me every step of the way?
    Diane sagged, not expecting God to answer at all, but certainly not to answer in the voice of grinding gears and shifting hydraulics. At the far end of the alley, the lights of a commercial trash truck were jostled as the beast tipped a Dumpster into its upturned mouth, filling the narrow passage with the sounds of bouncing cans and breaking glass.
    It wasn’t God, of course. Not really.
    Her attention snapped back to the waist-high window. She lifted her foot to the side not covered by the screen. She had enough room to hit the pane square on, and forcefully. She had enough body weight to put some power behind a good kick. She’d spent enough time in prison to know what a good kick was.
    The truck would need a minute to arrive. She had only one chance, maybe two, to make this work.
    Diane reached into the backpack and transferred the few remaining items from the center compartment into the smaller surrounding pouches. Then she shoved her foot inside the bag and zipped the sides up to her thick leg to prevent it from getting cut. She waited for the truck to arrive beneath her, hoping that the driver would stay put in his cab while the automated arms did their work, oblivious to her.
    The truck’s complaints were louder directly under her than they had been down the street, so loud that she considered kicking even before the dump. The Dumpster creaked as it came off the ground. She failed to make up her mind in time for a decision to matter.
    When she heard bags starting to slide, she kicked dead center in the pane of glass.
    And bounced off.
    Trash was