“… Peter …” Her voice was less than a whisper in the stillness.

“I love you, Anne …” His eyes had filled with tears and he had wanted to shout, “Don't go.” She smiled the magical smile that always filled his heart, and then with the ease of a sigh she was gone, as he stood in bereft horror and stared. Why wouldn't she fight? Why wouldn't she let him try? Why couldn't he accept what other people accepted from him every day? But he couldn't accept it now. He stood and stared at her, sobbing softly, until one of his colleagues led him away. They had taken him home and put him to bed, and somehow in the next days and weeks he had gone through all the motions that were expected of him. But it was like an ugly underwater dream, and he only surfaced now and then, until at last he realized how desperately his children needed him. And slowly, he had come back, and three weeks later he was back at work, but there was something missing now. Something that meant everything to him. And that something was Anne. She never left his mind for very long. She was there a thousand times a day, as he left for work, as he walked in and out of patients' rooms, as he walked into surgery, or back out to his car in the late afternoon. And when he reached his front door, it was like a knife in his heart again every time he went home, knowing that she wouldn't be there.

It had been over a year now, and the pain was dimmer, but not yet gone. And he somehow suspected that it never would be. All he could do was continue with his work, give everything he could to the people who turned to him for help … and then of course there were Matthew, Mark, and Pam. Thank God, he had them. Without them he would never have survived. But he had. He had come this far, and he would live on … but so differently … without Anne….

He sat in the stillness of the recovery room, his long legs stretched out before him, his face tense, watching Sally breathe, and at last her eyes opened for an instant and fuzzily swept the room.

“Sally … Sally, it's Peter Hallam … I'm here, and you're fine …” For now. But he didn't say that to her, nor did he even let himself think that. She was alive. She had done well. She was going to live. He was going to do everything in his power to see to it.

He sat at her bedside for another hour, watching her, and speaking to her whenever she came around, and he even won a small, weak smile from her before he left her shortly after one in the afternoon. He stopped in the cafeteria for a sandwich, and went back to his office briefly, before coming back to the hospital to see patients at four o'clock, and at five thirty he was on the freeway on his way home, his mind once again filled with Anne. It was still difficult to believe that she wouldn't be there when he got home. When does one stop expecting to see her again, he had asked a friend six months before. When will I finally understand it? The pain he had come to know in the past year and a half had etched a certain vulnerability into his face. It hadn't been there before, that visible hurt of loss and sorrow and pain. There had only been strength there before, and confidence, the certainty that nothing can ever go wrong. He had three perfect children, the perfect wife, a career he had mastered as few men do. He had climbed to the top, not brutally but beautifully, and he loved it there. And now what? Where was there left to go, and with whom?





CHAPTER 2

“Five minutes!” It was a familiar call, an ordinary scene, yet in its own remote way, the evening news had an element of “show biz” to it. There was that faint aura of circus and magic and stardom beneath the white lights. A mist of power and mystery enveloping them all, the heart beating just a shade faster at the sound of the words, “Five minutes!", then “Three!", then “Two!” The same words that would have rung out in a backstage corridor on Broadway, or in London, as some grande dame of the stage emerged. Nothing here was quite so glamorous, the crew standing by in running shoes and jeans, and yet, always that magic, the whispers, the waiting, and Melanie Adams sensed it herself as she stepped briskly onto the stage. As always, her entrance was timed to perfection. She had exactly one hundred seconds to go before they went on the air. One hundred seconds to glance at her notes again, watch the director's face to see if there was any last-minute thing she should know, and count quietly to herself just to calm down.