Carla's Secret (The Wish Granters, Book 2)

A long time ago something terrible happened to Carla Patterson. She locked that terrible thing away in a secret place and moved on with her life. Now the Wish Granters mysteriously arrive, offering her one wish that could change her life … or leave her brokenhearted. Will Carla wish for a new beginning, or turn the Wish Granters away and deny the love she might have had?

Excerpt from Carla's Secret

Chapter One
The high-pitched scream came from somewhere behind Carla’s Home Cooking. It lasted only a few seconds, just long enough to catch Carla’s attention. She looked up from her account book and pulled her reading glasses down her nose to see over them, as if that could help pinpoint the exact source. It didn’t. Not exactly.
At first she tried to shrug it off as just another night sound from the city. Had she really heard a scream? Probably it was a cat fight out back in the alley. Or it could have been a coyote. They’d been spotted in Brooklyn slinking around trash bags after dark.
But something about that scream stuck to her like a burr. She pushed aside the account book she’d been studying and stood up all in one fluid motion, walked swiftly to the back door, unlocked it, and peered down to the right where the short alley behind her restaurant ended in a wall and a series of backyard gardens one after the other, each delineated by its own fence. A construction dumpster to her left partially hid the view in that direction where the alley opened onto the busy commercial street.
Then she heard something else. Scraping and a muffled thump as if something had fallen. The skin on her arms tingled and she knew. She just knew. Past eleven, dark and cold out there now, it was a Thursday night when the alley should have belonged to stray cats and fat rats.