He slipped from under the blanket, tiptoed around the humongous doggie cushion where Rachel and Monica slept back-to-back—Ross and Joey preferred his wife’s side of the bed, while Phoebe had taken a shining to a spot near the head of the baby’s crib—and went out into the hall.

It was a chill night—well, morning—and after concluding his urgent visit to the bathroom, Rob peeked into the nursery to make sure that Laurie was covered. She was, indeed, nicely tucked in and curled into a ball like a diminutive version of her mother.

Rob blew her a kiss through the half-open door, saw Phoebe’s head pop up at him from her favorite nesting place on the rug, blew her one for good measure, and was starting back toward his bedroom when he decided to check on one more thing. He would be leaving for his fill-in shift at the Fairwinds before daybreak and wanted to be certain that he’d put his briefcase of ledgers and files on the little chair Cynthia had stood beside the front door for that single, solitary purpose, hoping to avoid another absentminded misadventure wherein he drove off to work without it.

Sure enough, it was there. Waiting conspicuously for him to snatch it up on his way out to the car.

Rob yawned and turned into his bedroom, having forgotten about a ledger he’d been looking at earlier and set down on the kitchen phone stand before hurrying to watch the ball game’s first pitch. Then he climbed back under the blankets with his wife, eager to catch the score—and a few more hours of sleep—beside the familiar warmth of her body.

They would be the last hours Rob and Cynthia Howell spent together in life.

NINE - CALIFORNIA

NINE

CALIFORNIA

TIRED, TIRED. AND WHY NOT? IT WAS FIVE A.M.

Hitting the SNOOZE control on her alarm clock, Julia Gordian stirred for work on Sunday thinking she could use about four more hours’ sleep, which would just about equal the number she’d actually gotten. Not that she felt she had any right to complain. There could be some good, not-so-good, and downright bad reasons for a person to stay awake into the early morning, and though it had been all too long since she’d enjoyed what was undeniably the best of them—plenty of opportunities for that had come Julia’s way since her divorce, some of them sorely tempting, but she hadn’t quite mustered the will to jump back aboard the dating merry-go-round—a baseball game like the beauty she’d watched on television last night made her bleariness seem a fair price to pay.