“Your sister… the police call… the plane… ” Annie felt as though she had been shot out of a cannon and was spinning in midair. Everything was in slow motion, and she could feel herself reeling at the words.

“What did they say?” Annie managed to grind out the words through the shards of glass in her throat. Every word she formed was a physical pain. “What happened? What did the police SAY?” She was shouting at Magdalena and didn’t know it. And all Magdalena could do was sob. “TELL ME, DAMMIT!” Annie shouted at her, as Magdalena tried to tell her in English.

“I don’t know… something happen… I call her cell phone and she not answer… they say… they say… the plane catch fire. It was the police in New London.”

“I’ll call you back,” Annie said, and hung up on her. She finally got a police emergency number in New London, that referred her to another number. A voice asked her who she was, and after she told them, there was an interminable silence on the other end of the phone.

“Are you nearby?” the voice wanted to know.

“No, I’m not nearby,” Annie said, torn between a sob and an urge to shout at this unknown woman. Something terrible had happened. She was praying they were only hurt. “I’m in New York,” she explained. “What happened to the plane?” She gave them the call numbers of Bill’s plane, and a different voice came on the phone. He said he was a captain, and he told her what she didn’t want to know and never wanted to hear. He said the plane had exploded on impact and there were no survivors. He asked her if she knew who was on the plane.

“My sister and her husband,” Annie whispered, as she stared blindly into space. This hadn’t happened. It wasn’t possible. This couldn’t happen to them. But it had. She had no idea what to say next so she thanked the captain and hung up. She told him he could contact her at her sister’s home in Greenwich and gave him the number. And then she grabbed her purse and walked out of the apartment without even turning out the lights.

Later, she could not remember getting into her car or traveling to Greenwich in a driving rain. She had no memory of it whatsoever. The promised storm had hit New York. She left her car in the driveway in Greenwich and was drenched when she got to the house. Magdalena was crying in the kitchen. The kids were upstairs watching a movie, waiting for their parents to come home. And when they heard the door slam as Annie walked in, they came running to see their mom and dad, and what they saw instead was her, standing dripping in the living room, her hair plastered to her head, the tears running down her face like rain.

“Where are Mom and Dad?” Ted asked, looking confused, and Lizzie stared at her with wide eyes. The moment she saw Annie standing there, she knew, and her hand flew to her mouth.

“Mom and Dad…,” Lizzie said with a look of horror, and Annie nodded as she ran halfway up the stairs to them and put her arms around all three. They clung to her like a life raft in a stormy sea, as the realization hit Annie with the force of a wrecking ball. Now all three of them were hers.

Chapter 2

The next days were a total nightmare. She had to tell them. Lizzie was devastated. Ted hid in the garage after he heard the news. Katie cried inconsolably. And at first Annie had no idea what to do. She went to New London to speak to the police. The wreckage of Bill’s plane was charred beyond recognition. There were no bodies, they had been blown to bits.

Somehow she managed to make the “arrangements.” She held a dignified funeral for them, and half of Greenwich came. Bill’s publishing associates came out from New York to pay their respects. And Annie had called her office and explained that she needed to take a week or two off and couldn’t make the presentation.

She moved into Bill and Jane’s house and went back to the city to get her things. The new apartment she loved was history. It had only one bedroom, and she didn’t want to uproot the children so soon, so she’d have to commute to the city. Magdalena agreed to move in. And Annie had to adjust to the idea that suddenly she was a twenty-six-year-old woman with three children. Jane and Bill had talked to her about it, that if anything happened to them, she would have to step in for them. Bill had no close relatives, and Annie and Jane’s own parents were dead. There was no one to take care of them now except Annie, and all four of them had to make the best of it. There was no other choice. And Annie’s vow to Jane the night before the funeral was to devote her life to their children and do the best she could. She had no idea how to be a mom, all she had ever been was a fun aunt, and now she would have to learn. She couldn’t even imagine stepping into their shoes, and she knew she was a poor substitute for parents like Bill and Jane, but she was all they had.

Seth had the grace to wait until a week after the funeral before he came to see her in Greenwich. He took her to dinner at a quiet place. He told her he was crazy about her, but he was twenty-nine years old, and there was no way he could take on a woman with three children. He said he had had a terrific time with her for the past two months, but this was way, way over his head. She said she understood. She didn’t cry, she wasn’t mad at him. She was numb. She said nothing after he explained the situation to her, and he drove her back to the house in silence. He tried to kiss her goodbye, and she turned her head away and walked into the house without a word to him. She had more important things to do now, like bring up three children. They had become a family overnight, and Seth wasn’t part of it, and didn’t want to be. She couldn’t imagine a man who would. She had grown up instantly the moment the plane had hit the ground.


* * *

Nine months later, in June, at the end of the school year, Annie moved them into the city, to an apartment she had rented, not far from the one she had just moved into when her sister died. This one had three bedrooms. And she signed the kids up in school in New York. Lizzie had turned thirteen by then, Ted was nine, and Katie six. Since she had been with them, Annie had done nothing but rush from work to home, to be with the kids. She spent the weekends taking Katie to ballet and Ted to soccer games. She took Lizzie shopping. She started Ted at the orthodontist and went to school meetings when she wasn’t working late. The architecture firm she worked for had been understanding about it. And with Magdalena covering for her, she managed to stay on top of her projects. And eventually she even got a promotion and a raise.

Bill and Jane had left their children comfortably provided for. Bill had made some good investments, the house in Greenwich sold for an excellent price, and so did the one on Martha’s Vineyard, and there had been an insurance policy for the children. They had what they needed financially, if Annie was careful with it, but they didn’t have a mom and dad. They had an aunt. They were patient with Annie while she learned. There were some bumps and some sad times for them all at first, but in time they all got used to the hand they’d been dealt. And Magdalena stayed.

In time, Annie got them through high school, through their first romances, and helped them apply to college. By the time he was fourteen Ted had decided to go to law school. Lizzie was obsessed with fashion and wanted to be a model for a while. And Kate had her mother’s artistic talent, but unlike the rest of them, she marched to her own drummer. She used her allowance to get her ears pierced at thirteen, and then her belly button, to Annie’s horror. She dyed her hair blue and then purple, and at eighteen she got a tattoo of a unicorn on the inside of her wrist, which must have hurt like hell when she got it. And she was a talented artist like her mother. She got accepted at Pratt School of Design and was a very capable illustrator. She looked like no one Annie had ever known. She was tiny, fiercely independent, and very brave. She had strong beliefs about everything, including politics, and argued with anyone who didn’t agree with her, and wasn’t afraid to stand alone. She had been a handful in her teens but eventually settled down once she got to college and moved into the dorm. Ted had his own apartment by then, and got a job after college, before he went to law school. Liz was working for Elle. Bringing up her sister’s children had been Annie’s vocation and full-time job. She had no other life but theirs and her work.

At thirty-five, Annie had opened her own architecture office, after nine years with the same firm. She loved what she did and preferred residential jobs to the big corporate ones she had done for years. After four years in her own firm, she had found her niche. And she was stunned by how much she missed the children when they moved out. It gave the term “empty nest” new meaning, and she filled the void in her life with more work instead of people.

She hadn’t had a date for the first three years the children lived with her, and after that there had been some minor relationships, but never a serious one. She didn’t have time. She was too busy taking care of her nieces and nephew and establishing herself as an architect. There was no room for a man in her life. Her closest friend, Whitney Coleman, scolded her for it regularly. They had been friends since college, and Whitney was married to a doctor in New Jersey, with three kids of her own, younger than the Marshall children. She had been a source of endless support for Annie, and invaluable advice, and now all she wanted was for Annie to think of herself. She had thought of everyone else for thirteen years. The time had moved like a bullet in the night. The early years had been a blur, but after that, Annie had truly enjoyed the children she had raised. She had lived up to the vow she had made Jane and she had gotten the children grown up, and all three were doing well.

“Now what?” Whitney said to her after Kate moved into the dorm. “What are you going to do for yourself?” It was a question Annie hadn’t asked herself in thirteen years.

“What am I supposed to do? Stand on a street corner and whistle for a guy, like a cab?” She was thirty-nine years old and not panicked about being single. She didn’t mind. Things had turned out differently than she’d planned, but she was happy.

The kids were all good people, her architecture firm was a success, and she had more work than she could handle. She was doing well, and so were they. Ted had just applied to law school and had gotten a new apartment with a friend from college, and at twenty-five, Liz had just landed a job at Vogue, after working for three years at Elle. Each of them was on a career path. Annie had done her job. The only thing she didn’t have was a life of her own, other than work. They were her life, and she insisted that was all she needed.

“That’s ridiculous!” Whitney said irreverently. “You’re not a hundred years old, for chrissake. And you have no excuse not to date now-the kids are grown up.” She had fixed Annie up with several blind dates, none of which had worked out, and Annie said she didn’t care.

“If I’m meant to meet a guy, it’ll happen one of these days,” she said philosophically. “Besides, I’m too set in my ways now. And I want to spend holidays and vacations with the kids. A man would interfere with that. And it might upset them.”

“Don’t you want more in your life than just being an aunt?” Whitney asked her sadly. It didn’t seem fair to Whitney that Annie had sacrificed her own life for her sister’s children, but she didn’t seem to mind, and she was happy as she was. Her own biological clock had run out of batteries years before, without a sound. She had three children she loved and didn’t want more.

“I’m happy,” Annie reassured her, and she seemed to be. The two women met for lunch when Whitney came into the city, usually to go shopping. And Annie went to New Jersey for the weekend once in a while, after the kids were gone, but most of the time she was too busy working on weekends to go anywhere. And her work was beautiful. There were several handsome townhouses on the Upper East Side that she had renovated, spectacular penthouses, and several beautiful estates in the Hamptons, and one in Bronxville. And she had turned a number of brownstones into offices for clients. Her business was booming and continued to grow. She had just turned down a job in Los Angeles, and another in London, because she said she didn’t have time to travel. She was happy working in New York. And basically she was happy with her life, and it showed. She had done exactly what she wanted and what she’d promised. She had accompanied her nieces and nephew from childhood to young adulthood, and she didn’t mind the sacrifices she’d had to make at all. And by the time she was forty-two, Annie was one of the most successful architects in New York, and loved practicing on her own.