One of the girls screams.

Buddy Golam shouts: "Cops!"

Billy Golam swings the.357 up in my face. I suck in my last breath.

And then I opened my eyes and felt sick at the knowledge that I was still alive.

This was the way I had greeted every day for the past two years. I had relived that memory so many times, it was like replaying a movie over and over and over. No part of it changed, not a word, not an image. I wouldn't allow it.

I lay in the bed and thought about slitting my wrists. Not in an abstract way. Specifically. I looked at my wrists in the soft lamplight-delicate, as fine-boned as the wing of a bird, skin as thin as tissue, blue-lined with veins-and thought about how I would do it. I looked at those thin blue lines and thought of them as lines of demarcation. Guidelines. Cut here.

I pictured the needle-nose point of a boning knife. The lamplight would catch on the blade. Blood would rise to the surface in its wake as the blade skated along the vein. Red. My favorite color.

The image didn't frighten me. That truth frightened me most of all.

I looked at the clock: 4:38 A.M. I'd had my usual fitful four and a half hours of sleep. Trying for more was an exercise in futility.

Trembling, I forced my legs over the edge of the bed and got up, pulling a deep blue chenille throw around my shoulders. The fabric was soft, luxurious, warm. I made special note of the sensations. You're always more intensely alive the closer you come to looking death in the face.

I wondered if Hector Ramirez had realized that the split second before he died.

I wondered that every day.

I dropped the throw and went into the bathroom.

"Good morning, Elena. You look like shit."

Too thin. Hair a wild black tangle. Eyes too large, too dark, as if there was nothing within to shine outward. The crux of my problem: lack of substance. There was-is-a vague asymmetry to my face, like a porcelain vase that has been broken, then painstakingly restored. The same vase it was before, yet not the same. The same face I was born with, yet not the same. Slightly skewed and strangely expressionless.

I was beautiful once.

I reached for a comb on the counter, knocked it to the floor, grabbed a brush instead. Start at the bottom, work upward. Like combing a horse's tail. Work the knots out gently. But I had already tired of looking at myself. Anger and resentment bubbled up through me, and I tore the brush through my hair, shoving the snarls together and tangling the brush in the midst of the mess.

I tried maybe forty-five seconds to extricate the thing, yanking at the brush, tearing at the hair above the snarl, not caring that I was pulling hair out of my head by the roots. I swore aloud, swatted at my image in the mirror, swept the tumbler and soap dish off the counter in a tantrum, and they smashed on the tile floor. Then I jerked open a drawer in the vanity and pulled out a scissors.

Furious, shaking, breathing hard, I cut the brush free. It dropped to the floor with a mass of black hair wrapped around it. The pressure in my chest eased. Numbness trickled down through me like rain. Calm.

Without emotion, I proceeded to hack away at the rest of my mane, cutting it boy-short in ten minutes. The result was ragged with a finger-in-the-light-socket quality. Still, I'd seen worse in Vogue.

I swept up the mess-the discarded hair, the broken glass-tossed it in the trash, and walked out of the room.

I'd worn my hair long all my life.

T he morning was cool, shrouded in a thick, ground-hugging fog, the air ripe with the damp scents of south Florida: green plants and the murky canal that ran behind the property; mud and manure and horses. I stood on the patio of the little guest house I lived in and breathed deeply.

I had come to this farm a refugee. Jobless, homeless, a pariah in my chosen profession. Unwanted, unloved, abandoned. All of it deserved. I had been off the job two years, most of that time spent in and out of hospitals as doctors repaired the damage done to my body that day at the Golam brothers' trailer. Piecing together shattered bone, patching torn flesh, putting the left side of my face together like a three-dimensional puzzle. They had been less successful with my psyche.

Needing something to do until I could make up my mind about reaching for that boning knife, I had answered an ad in Sidelines, a locally based, biweekly magazine for the horse industry: GROOM WANTED.

Life is strange. I don't want to believe anything is preordained. To believe that, one would have to accept the existence of a viciously cruel higher power in order to explain things like child abuse and rapists and AIDS and good men being shot dead in the line of duty. But the occasional twist of fate always makes me wonder.

The phone number in the ad belonged to Sean Avadon. I'd known Sean a hundred years ago in my riding days, when I was a spoiled, sulky, Palm Beach teenager and he was a spoiled, outrageous twenty-something spending his trust fund on horses and mad flings with pretty young men from Sweden and Germany. We had been friends, Sean always telling me I needed him to be my surrogate sense of humor and fashion.

Our families lived a couple of mansions down from one another on the Lake Worth side of the narrow island, Sean's father a real estate magnate, mine an attorney to the wealthiest crooks in south Florida. The slumlord and the shyster, each of them sire to ungrateful offspring. Sean and I had bonded in parental disdain and our love for horses. Wild child times two.

All that had seemed so long ago as to be a dream I could barely remember. So much had happened since. I had left Palm Beach, left that world. I had metaphorically lived and died in another life. Then I answered that ad: GROOM WANTED.

I didn't get the job. As bad a shape as I was in, even I could see the pity in his eyes when we met for drinks at The Players. I was a dark shadow of the girl Sean had known twenty years past, so pathetic I didn't have the pride to fake mental health. I guess that might have been rock bottom. I might have gone home that night to the apartment I was renting and tried to find that boning knife.

Instead, Sean took me in like a stray cat-a recurring theme in my life. He put me in his guest house and asked that I work a couple of his horses for the winter season. He claimed he needed the help. His ex-trainer/ex-lover had run off to Holland with his groom and left him in the lurch. He made it sound like he was giving me a job. What he was giving me was a stay of execution.

Three months had passed. I was still fantasizing about suicide, and every evening I took a bottle of Vicodin out of my nightstand, emptied out the pills, and looked at them and counted them and thought how one pill would ease the physical pain that had been with me every day since "the incident," as my attorney called it. (How sterile and neat that sounded. A small segment of unpleasantness that could be snipped from the fabric of life and isolated. How in contrast to my memories.) One pill could ease the pain. Thirty could end it. I had a stockpile of three hundred and sixty pills.

Every evening I looked at those pills, then put them back in the bottle and put the bottle away. I had never taken one. My evening ritual.

My daily ritual for the past three months was the routine of Sean's barn and time spent with his horses. I found both rituals comforting, but for very different reasons. The pills were a connection to death, and every night I didn't take them was a victory. The horses were a connection to life, and every hour spent with them was a reprieve.

Early on in my life I came to the conclusion that my spirituality was something uniquely and privately my own, something I could find only deep within a small quiet space in the very center of my being. Some people find that place through meditation or yoga or prayer. I find that place within me when I am on a horse. My Zen religion: the equestrian art of dressage.