Midnight Solitaire Read Online Free

especially out on the open road. Strangest damn weather this time of year, she thinks. Sunny and still one minute, pouring rain the next, snowing the next. The radio station with the ’80s retro format she’s been listening to fades in and out, losing strength the farther Greer drives, and she’s not seen oncoming headlights or even any behind her in more than twenty minutes. She hits the SCAN button on the FM tuner in the hopes of locking on a signal strong enough to tune in, but the digital numbers tumble one into the next, spanning the dial again and again. Looming in the distance is a row of huge high-tension towers, metal giants standing in the dark rain like otherworldly shrines left behind by an ancient alien culture. That explains it, she thinks, switching off the tuner. She knows she’s somewhere near the western part of the state, but Greer isn’t familiar with these back roads. She’s been damn near everywhere in her thirty-seven years—all over the United States and into select areas of Canada and Mexico—but she’s a flyer. For years she’s jetted into a locale, conducted business in hotels, restaurants or boardrooms, at conventions or the occasional tradeshow, then hopped another flight to wherever else the company has her going. I’ve been everywhere, she often jokes, but only to their hotels, restaurants and airports. Now, like everything else, it doesn’t seem as fun as it once did. No, that’s the wrong word. It was never fun. She moved through her life like a spectator, conducting it in ways she’d become accustomed to, but in recent months what was once automatic-pilot-doable has become unbearable. A life where numbers and sales and clients and schedules and product took the place of friends, family, love and a real life had never been her dream, was never part of the plan. Yet here she is. The occasional one-night stands on the road, the loneliness, a life of impersonal and surface interactions with people she barely knows and will probably never see again, the fear of waking up one day and realizing who she’s really become, what she’s really done with her so-called life and how she’s wasted much of it as a salesperson, bopping from state to state, client to client, city to city, making money, kicking ass and taking names. That’s Greer Fields, a machine. That’s what her colleagues have called her for years, a machine in a skirt-suit and heels that can close a client before they even know she’s worked them. And now she’s little more than a ghost in her own haunted life. She has no family, no relationship and few friends. Decades before there was a husband—the one true love of her life—but her career on the road killed that within a year. She’s never looked back. At least that’s what she tells herself when she’s alone in the dark, drunk and full of regret. A few boyfriends—even a girlfriend briefly once—but nothing of any real import or value. Like everything else in her life, relationships are transitory, and her constant motion leaves little time to worry about it, think about it or change it. There is her apartment in Boston, a beautiful and elegant space with a great view others can only dream about. There is her car, the Audi—a new one every three years—a closet full of clothes, jewelry, nice things, and with no husband, no kids and no mortgage, a great portfolio with a huge retirement fund. Not too shabby for an orphan raised in foster homes who had to scratch and claw her way to anything even remotely resembling happiness. And yet, possessions, six-figure salary and all, she’s miserable. Alone, lost, drifting closer and closer to forty with each passing day and still with no clue as to how she might escape this life before she becomes that grizzled old alcoholic seller she’s seen on the road for years, hanging out in airport bars, her best days reduced to vague memories, struggling to hang on and get by while trying to compete with younger, sexier,