'… so you've already got practical work experience? Look, Christina, after what I'm hearing, if you don't come down and apply at McCabe & Roth, I will come out to USF and try to recruit you myself, clear?' He grinned.

Her champagne was half-gone. 'I should really watch what I say when I'm drinking. Now Joe is really going to be upset.'

'I bet he won't be upset.' He touched her arm. 'Don't you be upset either. This is a party. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to push it if it's-'

'No, he will. He also said that there's no sense applying if we're going to get married because there's a policy against attorneys being married.'

'Are you engaged? I don't see a ring.'

'Well, not yet, not exactly, but…'

Dooher pushed it. 'Christina, Joe's a good attorney but this doesn't have to do with him. It has to do with what's best for your career. It's your decision. You come down and apply, and it'll go through channels from there,capisce?'

'All right.'

'Promise?'

She nodded.

He clinked his glass against hers, and they drank.

He awoke without the alarm in the half-dark, listening to the water still dripping from the gutters. The digital clock on the nightstand read 5:30.

He and Sheila hadn't come up to bed until nearly 2:00, but Dooher had always been able to wake up at any time he wanted, no matter how long he'd slept. It was a matter of control, of discipline.

And he had made plans for early.

Sheila slept on her side of the bed, the covers pulled high over her, and he slipped out and walked over to the window. It was cold in the room but the chill braced him. He stood, shivering, enjoying it.

The storm continued with no sign of letting up. His spacious back lawn looked gray and somber, mottled with soaking clumps of plant matter. The old elm's skeleton hung barren, the bushes in the rose garden reached out their swollen arthritic fingers – the whole place sepulchral within its enclosing hedges.

It was Ash Wednesday.

Abe Glitsky's eyes opened to blackness and he was suddenly all the way awake, sprung from fitful sleep by the jack-in-the-box mechanism that had controlled his metabolism over the past five months, ever since Flo had been diagnosed.

Unlike a jack-in-the-box, though, he didn't move. Pop went the weasel and the lids of his eyes shot open, but that was all that happened on the outside.

He lay there, listening in the dead room. His wife was breathing evenly, regularly. His head rang – an anvil for the staccato hammering of his heart.

Glitsky was a Homicide Inspector with the Police Department. He'd been getting through the days by doing what he had to do in five-minute increments, on the theory that if he could just make it through the next five minutes, he'd be all right.

When the long vigil began, while he felt he still had some analytical powers left, he'd tried to make it through entire days at a time by force of will. He wouldn't think about what was coming, what would be. But his focus on those days would keep splitting up, disintegrating into pointillistic little nothings, the stuff of his life unconnected, separating.

Now he was down to five-minute intervals. He would function for five minutes, keep his focus. There were twelve five-minute intervals in one hour, two hundred and forty in twenty hours. He'd consciously done the math. He was doing twenty-hour days, on average. He was also into sit-ups, two hundred and forty sit-ups every day. A symbol.

He wondered how he could be so tired and not sleep, not be sleepy at all. He was never sleepy – tired beyond imagining, far beyond what he'd ever thought were the limits of his physical endurance, but his brain never slowed.

Sometime in the course of a night or post-midnight morning, the apparatus that was his body would shut down and he would lie unconscious for a few hours, but this never felt like sleep.

Last night – a blessing – the boom had lowered while he lay in bed next to his wife, praying for it.

Now – pop – he was up.

The digital changed – a flicker at the periphery of his vision, the only light in the room -5:15. Still deep dark, yes, but morning really. Far better than when the pop was 3:30, when he knew he was up for the day and it was still night.

He swung his legs off the bed.

At 6:15, Dooher was in the fifth row of St Ignatius on the campus of the University of San Francisco because of a hunch that Christina Carrera would appear, as she'd implied jokingly when she'd said her goodbyes last night.

Dooher realized that the odds might be long against her actually getting up and coming down to church for ashes, but long odds had never fazed him.

After all, what had been the odds, back when he was fifteen, that the baseball team he played for, from San Carlos, California, would go all the way to the Babe Ruth World Series? And then, beyond that, that Dooher would come up in the bottom of the seventh inning, two out, one run down, with his best friend Wes Farrell standing on second base? And that he would hit a home run to win the whole thing?

Long odds.

Or, when he'd managed the Menlo Park McDonald's in 1966 and '67 during his first two years at Stanford and decided to take the stock option they were offering to their management employees even though it lowered his pay by ten percent, to under three dollars an hour. He'd taken a lot of grief from friends about the thousand dollars he was throwing down the drain, but Mark had had a hunch, and when he got out of law school eight years later, that stock was worth over $65,000 and he and Sheila used it as the down payment on the home he still owned, which they'd bought for $97,000 in 1975, and was now worth well over a million.

Long odds.

Kneeling in the pew, his knee jammed painfully into the space between the padding so it would hurt, some of the other riskier chances he'd taken came back at him. The time when…

But, halting his reverie, Christina appeared in his peripheral vision. He lowered his head in an attitude of prayer. She was wearing jeans, boots, a Gore-Tex overcoat, and did not see him. She kept walking, her own head bowed. A couple of pews in front of him, she genuflected, stepped in and kneeled.

The Glitskys lived in an upper duplex on Lake Street, and Abe was in the kitchen, bringing handfuls of cold water to his face. A steady downpour was tattooing the roof, but a thin ribbon of pink hung in the eastern sky, off to the right, out the window over the sink.

The thing to do was get the chores started, but he couldn't move. The order of things didn't flow anymore.

How could he do this alone?

He wasn't going to ask that question, not in this five minutes. It would paralyze him. He wouldn't think about it.

He depended on Flo – she was one of the world's competent beings. The two of them had split up their domestic duties long ago. Glitsky had always helped with heavy cleaning; he'd fixed things, lifted and moved, washed and dried dishes, organized shelves and rooms and closets. When the boys had been born, he'd changed diapers and heated baby food, but eventually their care – dressing them, feeding them, comforting them – had fallen mostly to Flo.

And now it was falling back on him.

How was he going to do it?

Stop it!

It wasn't that he minded doing more work, or even thought about the work. Flo was not someone who worked for him. She was his partner. In some fundamental way, he felt he was half her, she half him.

And their life together – his job, her competence, the boys – had taken every bit of both of them together. How could that continue with only half of them? It wasn't a matter of shaking the thoughts because they weren't really thoughts.