Okay. Maybe he gave it to the poor, but probably not. Cassie glanced at her darling son. Teddy was wiggling uncomfortably in his chair. "Maybe Teddy knows where the stuff is," she said softly.

"Mom's right. We don't have to talk about this now," Teddy murmured.

"What's the matter with you? Of course we do. The debts are huge. Almost a million dollars."

"Well, Daddy must have it saved somewhere. He's very careful. I'm sure he's got it covered," Cassie said with a quavering voice. They didn't have to do it now.

"Why are you glossing this over?" Marsha was beside herself.

"Sweetheart, when Daddy wakes up, I'm sure he'll explain all of this to us. He always has reasons for everything he does."

"Mom, these are your signatures."

Cassie tilted her head to one side. For a second, her vision failed her. Her signatures? How could that be? Red spots appeared before her eyes. They turned to green ones, white ones. Marsha handed over a Tiffany receipt. Cassie took it. She squinted at the slip through puffy eyes and the fireworks of spots, and she saw, clear as mud, her very own signature, Cassandra Sales. All those s's skipping along just the way she always wrote them. Proud and perky as can be. She scratched the side of her face and didn't feel a thing, nothing except the sword between her ribs, ripping her guts out. "Shh," was the only sound she could make. "Shh."

CASSIE PACED BACK AND FORTH IN THE KITCHEN, brooding about her children. It was a s if she and they had become instant enemies, standing, armed and dangerous, on opposite sides of the great unbridgeable divide that was the family fortune. Even when Marsha and Teddy finally stopped yelling at her and marched off to their rooms in a huff, it was clear that they were dying to prosecute her for unspeakable crimes that could deprive them of their inheritance. If she'd allowed them to continue, they might well have subjected her to harsh lights and hectoring interrogations all morning until she broke and confessed to spending sprees from which they had been excluded.

But she hadn't allowed them to question her, so they'd been forced to succumb to fitful sleep instead. The truth was, Cassie didn't want to dignify their accusations with a denial. Further, she didn't want to adjust their skewed perceptions just yet. Her heart throbbed in her face, distracting her from the hunger that had been gnawing at her belly for over a week. She was starved, but she wasn't able to eat a thing. She looked worse than ever. Since yesterday, her bruises had started to yellow, giving her both a beaten and jaundiced appearance. Yesterday her face had been a plastic surgery postop horror. Now it was a Noh mask of acrimony and psychic pain.

How could the children she'd loved and cared for, cherished all their lives, believe she'd done something so wrong when they both knew it was their father who was the finagler in the family. It was no secret that he liked to cheat the IRS. He called his ways with money the entrepreneurial spirit. It was an actual philosophy. For every honest and straightforward way of doing something, he came up with three corners to turn and two tangents to follow to get the job done in a much more convoluted manner to hide something. What had never occurred to Cassie was that he might cheat not just the government but real people. He might cheat her. It was horrifying.

Mitch had always told her he was saving, saving, saving, but he was also something of a kidder, kidder, kidder. And now she could easily see that, for all she knew, he'd been spending all along. He might already have purchased their retirement home in Boca Raton and furnished it from ABC just for her. And he'd used her signature for tax reasons, just like he'd lived way below his means for tax reasons. This explanation of house buying in secret was not entirely beyond the realm of possibility, but she knew that's not what he'd done.

Outside, the sun rose on Cassie's perfect garden. Inside, her secure home shifted under her feet. A sudden flash of red betrayed the flight of a cardinal across the lawn. Unaware of her standing motionless for a moment at the kitchen window, the bird aimed for the feeder near the back door. It landed and began to pick at the seeds, and Cassie trembled in awe at the spectacular beauty and ordinariness of the new day. As the light fused the sky and filtered through the leaves of the oaks dappling the grass, she struggled for balance. She didn't want her husband to die, but she didn't want him to be a cheat and a liar, either. And she didn't want to be another one of those people who jumped to a conclusion without real facts in front of her.

She knew he was reckless, but it was a leap to think he would actually hurt her. Still, someone was driving around a new Jaguar charged in her name when she'd had her Volvo for so long, it was old enough to go to college. That hurt. She made a sudden angry movement, and the cardinal darted away. Disappointed, she turned to the clock and was disappointed again. She wanted it to be nine, but it was still only six-thirty, too early to call anyone, to take any action, to do anything at all.

Time was passing so slowly, she thought she'd go crazy. She longed to drink a quart of vodka, or at least to smoke a cigarette to punctuate her frustration and pass the time. The last cigarette she'd smoked was in 1970. Same with the vodka. Mitch sold fine wines but didn't like seeing her drink in his presence. He had a philosophy about that, too. He didn't want her pilfering, wasting the product, and becoming a drunk. He despised all drunks except himself. He had a very high opinion of himself.

She paced back and forth. What to do? What to do? Her surgeon had decreed that she must not put her glasses on while the stitches remained around her ears. She must not worry or think angry thoughts. She was not supposed to drive the car. She was supposed to gobble down tranquilizers and painkillers to dream happy dreams for a lovely, unscarred beautiful young face. But how could she do that now? She wanted to put on her glasses and get into those files of Mitch's to discover the truth about the house in Boca Raton that he had not bought just for her. She wanted to drive to the hospital on her own. She didn't care if Mitch was in a coma. She had to talk to him.

But old habits die hard. She couldn't help following orders. Afraid of infection, she didn't put on her glasses. Afraid of driving into a wall, she didn't take out the car. While she waited for Marsha to wake up and chauffeur her, she foraged in the refrigerator, in the freezer. Now she was ready to eat, but that girl had not provided any food for her. There was not a damn thing in the house to eat. No coffee cake, no sticky buns, no bagels, no croissants. Nothing gooey, nothing sweet. Nothing! Marsha had gone off food and wouldn't let anybody else eat. Cassie sipped a little orange juice, but not through a straw. She was starving.

Around seven, after waiting around for hours, she wandered into Mitch's den, where Teddy and Marsha had left things a big mess. So thoughtless of them. The computer screen had colorful fish on it that swam back and forth as the sound of water gurgled out of the speakers. She punched a button and a menu came up. She couldn't exactly see it, but she knew what was on it. Office something. Windows something. AOL something. Quicken something. She bet their whole life was in that computer, and she'd never dared to look in it. Never. Even the simplest bills had waited until Mitch had gotten around to printing them out.

She'd always been a little phobic about the computer, and she'd always accepted the deal. She had a husband who was fussy about privacy. The house had been her territory. Finance had been Mitch's territory. Now she was angry that Teddy and Marsha had been the first invaders of it, had thought they had discovered some terrible secret about her and were eager to believe it. She had no idea how many hours they'd been looking into his files, or how much they thought they'd learned. She shut off the computer and went upstairs to take a bath and brood some more. She did this for quite a while.