That was what her mother had called it when Carrie was a kid and her mother thought she was getting too worked up about something. “You're being dramatic, dear,” Rose would say. “Are you sure you're not trying to draw attention to yourself? That's ego, Carrie, and you must never indulge in ego. The nuns tried to teach me that when I was your age, and I wish I had listened. Just remember, you and I are just ordinary people.”

That had been a lie. Carrie's mother hadn't had an ordinary bone in her body. If you looked up “not ordinary” in the dictionary you'd find a picture of Rose Manning. And she never had to try to draw attention to herself—it came to her automatically. For years it was her looks that did it. When she was young, Rose Manning's beauty was almost unnerving. Carrie closed her eyes and pictured her mother: the tall, slender body made for fashion—although by the time Carrie knew her, Rose was no longer wearing couture—the huge, green almond-shaped eyes, the high, sculpted cheekbones, and the creamy skin. Rose's thick red-gold hair was always piled in a shiny mass at the back of her head, her mouth was delicate but somehow still full, and her nose was aquiline perfection. When you put the whole package together you got a mix of ethereal and elegant that stopped conversations. And the magic had lasted for decades. When Rose died she was sixty-four, and until her last year when the cancer finally took over, she could still silence a room just by entering it.

But Carrie's mother had always been more than just a breathtakingly pretty face. She had possessed an internal power her daughter could never define or understand. Wearing one of her interchangeable skirt-and-blouse ensembles—she never spent time on wardrobe—and exhausted from a night spent volunteering at her homeless shelter, Rose could glide into a board meeting packed with Wall Street sharks and dominate. Carrie opened her eyes.

“Is it pretty out there in Katonah?” she asked Howie. She and Howie were both city people, but after Carrie had canceled the wedding, he'd relocated to the suburbs, saying he'd needed to move on. Carrie couldn't imagine anyone voluntarily not living in Manhattan, but since he was her friend—thank you, God, because she wasn't quite sure she could handle it if he weren't—she tried to be supportive. “I bet it's pretty out there,” she repeated.

“It's hard to tell; it's still a little dark outside.”

“Was it pretty last night before you went to bed?”

“I guess,” Howie said. “There's a big bush on my front yard that was there when I bought the place, and it's starting to get all these yellow flowers on it. The guy across the street says it's a forsythia.”