She lay back to wait for the alarm and try to compose her mind. This Sunday morning was actually the one day of the year she most dreaded. The anniversary. It had been back when Steve was still alive. They were living in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York, in a brownstone town house they were renting. The rent was high, but they were doing all right. Steve was a political consultant, who had helped some fledgling candidates overcome the odds and win important elections. In between campaigns here, he also got work in the nominal democracies in Latin America. She was a partner in a small firm of architects who had all been at Columbia together and decided to team up after graduation and start a business. There were four of them--she was the only woman--and it was a struggle at the beginning. For the first three years they had to live off crumbs tossed their way by the big boys, subcontracts from Skidmore and other giants. They felt like they were a high-paid version of Manpower, Inc., doing grunt work, designing the interiors of shopping malls in the Midwest and banks in Saudi Arabia, while their prime contractors got to keep all the sexy, big-budget jobs that called for creativity, like a glass-and-steel office tower in L.A. But then interesting work finally started to trickle in, including a plum job to convert a massive parking garage in Greenwich Village into a luxury condominium. Through a wild coincidence (or luck) she had personally designed the apartment she later ended up buying for herself. Just when everything seemed to be turning around and going her way, an event happened that stopped her in her tracks. Five years ago on this very day, April 5, her mother, Nina, phoned her at six-thirty in the morning and, in a trembling voice that still haunted, announced that her father was dead. Arthur Wade Hampton was fifty-nine and he'd been cleaning his Browning shotgun for an early-morning hunting trip to Long Island--so he'd claimed the night before--and ... she was awakened by the explosion of a discharge. A horrible accident in the kitchen of their co-op in the West Village. Like Hemingway. Thinking back, they both realized it was the wrong time of year to hunt anything--but they both also knew he wanted the world to think that. Moreover, it was precisely the kind of vital lie they'd need to get through the pointed questions and skeptical looks that lay ahead. It was a knowledge all the more palpable for being unspoken. There's no time like those first moments after a tragedy to create a special reality for yourself. It was only in the aftermath that she managed to unravel the reason. He owned and operated an interior-design firm in SoHo called CitiSpace, and he had mortgaged it to the hilt. He was on the verge of bankruptcy. (That was why Ally had not spoken to her younger brother, Grant, in the last 4 1/2 years.)