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in bed for eight weeks again, demanding and restless to get back to work. She damned the fragility of old bones as she got quickly out of bed, slipped on her robe, and rushed down the hall, glad that some of the acolytes had stayed overnight because Martin was twice her size and she knew she wouldn’t have the strength to pick him up off the floor. But then she heard him screaming again and again and realized that this was something more than a fall, that something was still happening, and then she saw the flames through the slit between the bathroom door and the jamb.
    Leona pushed the door wide open and saw that Martin’s bathrobe was ablaze and that Martin himself was burning like a fireball. He was trying to get the burning robe off himself, lunging at the walls as if to try to smother the flames. Leona pushed him toward the shower stall, not realizing she was burning her right hand, understanding that only Martin’s eyes were screaming now and that the spray of water might not be enough. Then hands were seizing her from behind, and she was pulled out of the bathroom as Ed, wearing nothing—he must have been sleeping naked—pushed Martin into the shower. Half a minute later Scott came to help, and he and Ed together did whatever they had to do to beat the fire out.
    When they pulled Martin out into the hall, his lips still twitched. When the rescue squad arrived minutes after Melissa’s call, Martin Fuller was still technically alive, but Leona knew that his life, her life, and his work were over.

CHAPTER THREE
    Archibald Widmer was the kind of lawyer whose corporate clients would appreciate the fact that his desk had no encumbrances except a signature pen in a marble holder and an appointment book that he called a diary. When a client was about to enter the paneled sanctum of his office, Widmer’s secretary, who had the demeanor of the headmistress of a school for wealthy young women, would put before him the client’s folder. On top was a discretely small memo on which an associate had summarized everything Widmer needed to know about the meeting. The telephone was located on the credenza behind him in order not to mar the concentration that a bare desk brought to the matter at hand.
    When he picked up the phone for the first time on that morning in April, his secretary asked, “Are you taking calls, Mr. Widmer?” for she knew that even when he was alone he did not always welcome interruptions.
    In fact he had been gazing out of the window of his twenty-sixth floor corner office at the magnificent view of New York harbor and thinking of his daughter Francine, who was now twenty-eight years old and had been seeing George Thomassy for almost half a year. Widmer had introduced them because Francine had been raped by a neighbor and wanted revenge. Thomassy was the only lawyer Widmer knew who could bend a reluctant legal system to prosecute and win an uncomfortable case. In the process, Francine told him she’d found in Thomassy that combination of drive and tenderness she had not found in the young men of her generation. Whatever the ingredients, the chemistry was immediate and visible to others.
    It was not exactly the match Widmer had in mind for his brilliant daughter, who contributed ideas, phrases, paragraphs to the speeches of the U.S. ambassador to the UN and might one day herself be that ambassador. Thomassy’s family was Upstate Armenian Immigrant, and, sadly, dead. Widmer had always hoped that his daughter’s choice would lead to what his own forebears had expected, an extension of family, not a mere acquisition of a solitary son-in-law. Perhaps it was luck that Thomassy’s parents were no longer among the living; what in heaven’s name would he and Priscilla talk about to a horse trainer and his wife whose world was bounded by inadequate English and an upstate farm?
    Yet what he had wanted for his daughter was not a replica of himself. He couldn’t have managed Priscilla if she’d been like