She still couldn’t figure out if she was imagining the ticking of the second hand or if it had always made noise and she’d never noticed it before. There was a perfectly good digital clock on the computer. Maybe she should throw the ancient, ticking menace in the Dumpster out back. Still, throwing it out wouldn’t stop time. The day was over. Her executioner would be walking through the office door sometime in the next half hour.Jane could help Jessie, but she couldn’t save herself. She was resigned to that. There was no way to put that dirty little genie back into the bottle. All she could do was try to soften the blow and mitigate the impact.Strange, but she felt fairly calm in the face of her worst fears coming true. Her pulse didn’t even quicken when she rose to knock on her boss’s open door.“Mr. Jennings?” she said. “I need to speak with you.”“Hey,” he murmured as he clicked around on something in his drafting program. Jane sat on one of the chairs in front of his desk and waited patiently.
