Syndrome

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.)

She felt she had no choice but to try to salvage what was left of the business and her father's reputation. She left the architectural firm and took over CitiSpace. It turned out she was easily as good an interior designer as she had been an architect, and before long she had a backlog of work and was adding staff. She restructured and, eventually paid off the firm's debt; it was now on a sound financial footing.

These days CitiSpace specialized in architectural rehabs in the Greenwich Village area, with as many SoHo and TriBeCa lofts as came her way. The work was mostly residential, but lately some lucrative commercial office jobs were beginning to walk through the door. Anything dependent on luxury real estate can be vulnerable in dicey times, but she'd been able to give everybody a holiday bonus for the past couple of years. She'd even given herself one this year, in the form of this new condo apartment, which she loved.

Another major reason she'd taken over CitiSpace was to try to provide her mother some peace and dignity in her twilight years. But then, irony of ironies, Nina, who was a very lively sixty-six, was diagnosed eighteen months ago with early-onset Alzheimer's. Now her consciousness was rapidly slipping away.

All the things that had happened over the last few years had called for a special kind of heart. She had known Steve Jensen, a freelance political consultant, for eight years, and they'd lived together for three of those, before they got married. He was warm and tender and sexy, and she'd envisioned them in rocking chairs forty years down the road. They'd been married for only six months when he got a job to help reelect the president of Belize. At first he was reluctant, concerned about human rights issues, but then he decided the other candidate, the alternative, was even worse. So he went.

How many things can be destined to go wrong in your life? Exactly seven months after her dad died, she received a phone call from the American Embassy in Belmopan, Belize. Steve had been flying with the presidential candidate over a stretch of southern rain forest in a single-engine Cessna when a sudden thunderstorm came out of the Caribbean and the plane lost radio contact. That was the last, etc.

She rushed there, but after two weeks the 'rescue' officially became a 'recovery' mission. Except there was never any recovery. After two months she flew back alone, the loneliest plane ride of her life.

She still had his clothes in her closet, as though to keep hope alive. When you love someone so much you think you could never live without them-and then one day you're forced to-it resets your thinking. Her dad's death and then Steve's. .

She wanted to love life, but life sometimes felt like it was asking more than she should have to give. She currently had no one special to spend her weekends with, but she hadn't given up, nor was she pushing it. All things in time, except time could be running out. .

Brrrringwent the alarm and Knickers responded with a lively 'Woof' She was anxious to get going.

'Come on, baby,' Ally said. 'Time for a treat.'

She struggled up and made her way into the kitchen and got down a box of small rawhide chews. It would give Knickers something to occupy her mind for the few minutes it took to get ready.

Since she lived at the west end of Barrow Street, right across the highway from the new Hudson River Park esplanade that defined that mighty river's New York bank, she had a perfect course for her morning runs. She usually liked to run down to the park at the rejuvenated Battery Park City and then back. She didn't know what the distance was exactly, maybe three-quarters of a mile each way, maybe slightly more, but it fit her endurance nicely. The weather was still cool enough in the mornings that Knickers could accompany her at full trot. In the heat of summer, however, they both had to cut back.

She'd put on blue sweats, got her Walkman prepped with a Beethoven quintet, and was just finishing cinching her running shoes when the phone jangled.

Sunday, April 5

7:18a.m.

Grant Hampton listened to the ringing and felt the sweat on his palms. For a normal person, this would be an insane time to call, but knowing his nutbag sister, she was probably already up and about to go out for her daily run. And this on a Sunday morning, for chrissake, when rational people were drinking coffee or having sex or doing something sensible like retrieving theTimesfrom the hallway and reading the columns in the Business section. He had left Tanya, his runway model live-in, to get her beauty sleep and had driven downtown at this unthinkable hour on a mission. He was chief financial officer of Bartlett Medical Devices, Inc., which was in imminent danger of going under and taking him with it.

Come on, Ally. Pick up the frigging phone.

He gazed out the windshield of his blue Porsche, now parked directly across the street from Alexa's lobby, and tried to calms pulse. He hadn't entirely worked out the pitch, but that was okay because he wanted to sound spontaneous. Who was it said, 'Sincerity, if you can just fakethat, you've got it made?' That was what-

'Hello.'

Thank God she's picked up.

'Hi, sis, remember the sound of my voice? Long time, right?' Come on, he thought, give me an opening here. There was a pause that Grant Hampton thought lasted an eternity.

'You picked a funny time to call.'

Is that all she has to say? Four and a half frigging years she shuts me out of her life, blaming me, and then. .

'Well, Ally, I figured there's gotta be a statute of limitations on being accused of something I didn't do. So I decided to take a flier that maybe four years and change was in the ballpark.'

'Grant, do you know what time it is? This is Sunday and-“

“Hey, this is the hour you do your Sunday run, right? If memory serves. So I thought I might drive down and keep you company.'

He didn't want to let her know that he was already there. That would seem presumptuous and probably tick her off even more. But by God hehadto get to her.

Again there was a long pause. Like she was trying to collect and marshal her anger.

'You want to come toseeme?Now?That's a heck of a-'

'Look, there's something really important I need to talk to you about. It's actually a big favor for you, sis. You've surely heard of Winston Bartlett?'

'I've also heard of Donald Trump. So?'

'Well, he's got a clinic out in New Jersey that-'

'Grant, I know you're a big shot in his medical conglomerate or whatever it is, but I'm not interested in whatever you're peddling. I'm going out to run now.'

He heard the sound of the phone clicking off, without so much as a good-bye.

Jesus,he thought, she really is ticked. This is going to be harder than I thought.

Okay, here goes Plan B.

He started the Porsche and slowly backed to the corner of Washington Street, where he parked again and then hunkered down, loving the smell of the new leather seat. Ally was going to come charging out of the front door in about two minutes, with that damned sheepdog that Steve gave her, assuming it was still around.

Grant Hampton was three years younger than Alexa and he lived in a different world. Whereas she'd never wanted to be anything but an architect, he had aimed directly for NYU School of Business. After that, he had gone to Wall Street and gotten a broker's license and begun an extremely lucrative career as a bond trader for Goldman Sachs. He discovered he had the nerves, as well as a gift for handling big numbers in his head. Soon he had a duplex co-op on the twenty-sixth floor of a new building on Third Avenue in the East Sixties. He loved the money