A thousand thanks to all the people who keep me financially savvy and sound . Judy Zilm, my bookkeeper and friend, has kept track of every little financial detail of my life for going on a decade. I couldn't possibly do it without her. Thanks to Kenny Hicks, my accountant, who has advised and bullied and relentlessly overpaid the government but has finally been truly fun with something-research for this novel. Through ups and downs of all the markets in recent years, Donald Wolfson has always been there to carry the burden. Thanks for taking the graveyard shift so I don't have to. Thanks are also due to tax professor Jan Sweeney, who gave me the textbooks and the goods on the IRS, and estate planner Charles Baldwin, who helped with insurance and other questions. Thanks to Dr. Thomas Loeb for help with research on cosmetic surgery. Thanks to my agent, Deborah Schneider; my editor, Joe Blades; and all the good people at Ballantine, from bottom to top, who work behind the scenes to produce the books and send them out into the world. This one is for all of you. Cheers.

LIFE HOLDS OUT ITS LITTLE SURPRISES. Our stories unfold sideways, backwards, upsi de down. In a single second truth can be shuffled like cards and scattered in all directions, never to be arranged the same way again. So it was with Cassandra Sales. At the moment she had her epiphany, she was kneeling in her garden surrounded by the exploding beauty of spring. Years of devoted attention to this garden had yielded absolute perfection, a feast of nature's botanical wonders.

Daffodils, egg yolk yellow, frolicked in a light wind off Long Island Sound less than a mile away. Hyacinths, blue, were heavy with moisture and fragrant beyond belief. Narcissi, hundreds of them in all manner of the palest pink, heavy cream, bisque, with touches of apple green and orange, also had an aroma to dream and rhapsodize about all year long. They nodded, too.

Now the tulips, the parrot kind, with ruffled feathers in pink and green. So thick, no earth could be seen below them. The beds were fully planted. There was no room for more. Above, a number of dogwood trees were in bloom. Two weeping cherry trees wept copiously by the front door. The whole garden enchilada on just over a half-acre plot. The place was a tiny gem.

Cassie's lifestyle was nowhere near as grand as her husband's business success as a top wine importer suggested it should be, and her house was nothing special either. It was just a step or two above the ordinary clapboard colonial, surrounded by thousands of similar two- and three-bedroom suburban dwellings of brick or shingle with two-car garages in old and pleasant neighborhoods on the North Shore of Long Island. It was her landscaping and gardens that put the property in an altogether different league from anything else around it. Everyone who went through the gate into the backyard felt the magic Cassie had brought to the place. An arbor was covered with roses all summer long. A small greenhouse contained an orchid collection that seemed continuously in bloom. A flagstone patio around the twenty-by-thirty in-ground pool had teak outdoor furniture and was artistically arranged with potted plants in decorative planters that changed with the seasons.

That day the fifty-year-old woman, who could have been anybody's relative, was kneeling all alone in a fine April drizzle wearing rubber boots, damp khakis, a sweatshirt, and a baseball hat. The garden, the unpleasant weather, her acute attention to detail despite it, her outfit, her mud-caked hands, and complete lack of vanity told her whole story. Almost.

The piece that didn't show was that turning fifty had driven her crazy as turning forty to forty-nine had not. Now she was looking at her life through a different prism and not liking what she saw. Her children were grown. Her husband, only five years older than herself, had an obsession with his business so intense, it seemed like an illness that robbed him of his old sense of fun and desire. He was limp morning and night. When she asked him what they could do about it, his finger would jump to his lips, "shhh," as if merely voicing the problem might blow them both away.

Although she'd never counted the days and months since last they'd tumbled around, giggling and panting in the sheets, on that rainy April day soon after she turned fifty, Cassie allowed herself to acknowledge it had been years. Years since a thrill! And her own real achievements didn't seem enough to pick up the slack. Here she was, secretly longing for passion and purpose, and what she was doing was cooking, growing orchids, and watching the Discovery Channel. She also read the newspapers and People magazine, caught the evening news programs and magazine format news shows. She followed the biographies on the Biography Channel and was a secret devotee of the nascent lives in The Real World on MTV. And the Survivors.

Cassie Sales saw all these lives and wished she could start over, have a job that paid her money instead of endlessly donating her gifts to causes like world hunger, whales, rain forests, refugees, battered women, child abuse, and cures for illnesses no one in her family had. She'd been very useful to others, donating her special gifts, but she was fifty and she'd had it.

Now she wanted to be beautiful again, like her daughter, Marsha, like her garden. She wanted to sparkle and dazzle, be flocked to by the birds and the butterflies and the bees that just didn't seem to come to her anymore. The longing to be seen by her husband and have fun was so intense, so fierce and relentless, it felt like unrequited love.

Was fifty that old? Was it? She knew perfectly well that fifty wasn't old. It was her problem that dazzle was gone. Other people way older than they were had sex every day. You saw it all the time on TV. Mitch wasn't old, he'd just fizzled out. The sudden longing for the birds and bees, after a dry spell of-Cassie didn't want to count the years-was everywhere in her dreams. She loved Mitch she was sure, but she was dreaming plane crashes, car crashes, a spectacularly fiery end to him absolutely every night. And she was dreaming love from other sources every single day. It had to be around somewhere. Other people were getting it. She fantasized burgeoning cocks in every man she saw. Young men, old men, nasty-looking men. Bald men, fat men, small men.

Everywhere burgeoning cocks. In the supermarket, in the bank. At doctors' offices. On the playing fields when she drove past the high school. When she was with her daughter, Marsha, in the city. No male was immune to her imagination. She thought about everybody. Everywhere. Something upsetting and unnatural happened to her when she turned fifty. Something snapped. She had no idea what it was. Suddenly she was tired of being sensible, of saving money, of being endlessly understanding and good about Mitch's languished desire. On the outside she was middle-aged, as predictable and conventional as a boiled potato, but on the inside she was beautiful, reckless, independent, a hard-drinking playgirl of twenty-three. Younger than those Sex and the City girls. She dreamed of death and youth in tandem.