ROSE LEANED BACK in the pink rocker. She owed Sandy a thank-you; the nanny had called in sick, so Rose had cleared the decks to take care of Carrie herself. And she was glad she'd taken the time, because her days of watching her child sleep like this in the middle of the day were numbered; soon Carrie would be too old for naps. But for the moment Rose could still sit in Bobby's stupid pink rocking chair and remember what it had felt like to be happy. Before the new nightmare had set in. Before things had changed again. She could practically pinpoint the day it had happened.

BOBBY HAD ALMOST finished the final draft of Family. His producer had already scheduled a series of backers’ auditions for the angels who were waiting for the privilege of putting their money into another surefire Bobby Manning hit. Lu had signed on the dotted line. George would be doing the orchestrations and the conducting. The team was in place, and all was right in Bobby's world.

Then he had his second heart attack.

Rose hadn't been at home at the time. Sandy was the one who realized what was happening, found his medicine—he always forgot to carry it—and gave him the pills that the doctor said had probably saved his life. Sandy had called the ambulance, ridden with him to the hospital, and had the presence of mind to insist the hospital use a false name for him when he was admitted, because Bobby was paranoid about word getting around that he was sick.

“That's not the image I want out in public,” he said from his hospital bed. “No one needs to know I'm not healthy as a horse. Because I will be again. I'll be good as new.”

But the doctors had a new diagnosis for him. Now they said the angina that had plagued him for so many years was to be categorized as unstable which was a far more serious form of the problem. The chest pains Bobby had always tried to dismiss were dangerous now—another heart attack could follow. Bobby was ill in a way that he hadn't been before. Rose knew she couldn't keep quiet any longer.

“I think you've just had a sign that you need to slow down,” she told him. He was home from the hospital and she'd overheard him talking on the phone with George about the backers’ auditions. “You've been pushing yourself too hard for too long.” When she looked back, she would realize that her timing couldn't have been worse. Bobby was scared about being sick, and he wanted to hear that everything was going back to normal.