His hands were sticky and wet.

Glitsky hadn't been able to sleep and didn't want to keep Flo up, so at around midnight he'd gone out to read on the couch in the living room. Taking a cue from his father Nat, a Talmud scholar, he had been immersed for weeks in Wilton Earnhardt's epic tome Gospel, a story about the missing New Testament book of Matthias. This was about as far from San Francisco crime and politics and his home life as he could get. Which was the point.

Eventually, he'd nodded off.

What got him up wasn't the shock but Flo screaming his name. The lamp next to him crashed to the floor. Sparks and broken pottery. One of the kids – he thought it was Jake, his middle one – was also calling him. God! Why were the other ones quiet?

'Abe!'

'Yo! Coming.'

Another shake, knocking him sideways. Bare feet on broken shards. In the short hallway, he turned on the light. Another step, the bedroom, the light. Flo looked at him, eyes wide and tearful, as though he were a ghost.

As well he might have been.

The six or seven-hundred pound oak armoire in which they kept their hanging clothes had jumped four feet across the room and fallen, landing on Glitsky's side of the bed, where he normally would have been lying.

Flo was up and in his arms, and Jake cried out again.

Sheila Dooher nudged her husband. 'Earthquake,' she said, swinging her feet around, finding the floor. Louder, another push. 'Mark! Now!'

People said you never got used to earthquakes, but Sheila had lived in the Bay Area most of her life and had experienced over twenty of them. The great majority of the time, they shook the ground or the building you were in and then stopped. And the other quakes… well, by the time you worked yourself up to really scared, they were over, and then you dealt with what they'd done.

Mark opened his eyes, immediately awake in the darkness. He knew that Sheila had moved to her pre-arranged location in the doorway to the stairs – it was a drill. And he did the same to his, four steps over to the bathroom door.

'You all right?' he heard her say.

There was another, smaller shake. They rode it out – three seconds max -

'Fine.'

For Sam Duncan, living in a seventy-year-old underground apartment with brick walls, there was no time for any thought. Either Quayle was a sounder sleeper than Bart was, or he wasn't as finely attuned to the tiny movements of the earth by which animals can supposedly predict earthquakes. In any case, Quayle didn't whine, or bark, or howl preceding the event. Sam was sleeping one moment, and the next – feeling something moving, falling around her in the split second she had to react – covering her head as the wall behind her bed gave, collapsing over her.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Before Christina was awake, her father Bill had gone downtown to the bakery and come back with hot ham-and-Swiss-filled croissants, her favorite. Irene, her mother, left the steaming cup of French roast on the nightstand in her room and brushed a strand of hair back over her daughter's ear.

She stirred.

'Your coffee's here,' her mother said.

Having driven down to Ojai in six hours, she'd arrived unannounced at ten-thirty last night and they'd kept the visiting short; she was tired and planning to stay through the weekend, get rested before finals next week – they'd get time to catch up in person. They'd all turned in early, around midnight.

Late April, before noon, and she was sitting out by the pool in her bathing suit, in perfect comfort. She wondered again why she was living in San Francisco, in the wind and fog and bustle. Here it was already warm as midsummer, the pace was slow, life itself seemed to have an element of fluid grace.

Her parents' house was on the side of one of the encircling hills at an elevation of about 400 feet, and the pool hung out, cantilevered over a deck that seemed to drop off into space.

Far below, the town sparkled in the pristine air, a little terra-cotta jewel nestled in its verdant setting. In the distance, the Topa Topa Mountains and the Los Padres National Forest lent some drama to the view. Closer in were the avocado and orange orchards, the golf course, the orange-roofed landmarks of her own childhood; over to the right she could just spy the edge of her high school, Villanova, for good Catholic girls as she had been.

There was the Tower at the Post Office, and in the peace of the morning she could hear Some Enchanted Evening coming up on the thermals – the Tower played show tunes on the hour.

Her eyes continued to roam. There were the trees over Libbey Park, downtown, where she'd gone to dozens of incredible concerts – blues, classical, jazz, rock 'n' roll – all the great LA players loved coming up here. This is where Hollywood came to drop out.

Ojai was the Chumash Indian word for Nest, and she thought it captured the place perfectly. It was her nest, her home. She wondered, again, if she'd ever really have another one.

Her mother was walking down from the house with some iced tea. She normally worked in her husband's brokerage house as his assistant, but decided she'd take the day off to catch up with her daughter.

Irene Carrera had a buffed leather complexion from too much sun, and her body, toned with regular exercise, was still twenty pounds overweight. Nevertheless, in a casual way she believed herself a beautiful woman, and so nearly everyone else thought she was, too. She frosted her hair and wore gold slippers padding about out by the pool and she appeared to be as shallow as a petri dish. But she'd never fooled Christina.

Now she sat in the wicker chair next to her daughter's chaise longue, put down the tray that held the pitcher and glasses, and placed coasters on either side of the table. 'You picked the right day to come down. San Francisco's had another earthquake.'

Christina sat up straight. 'A bad one?'

Her mother handed her a glass. 'They're saying moderately serious. Although if you ask me, they're all bad.'

'You can ask me, too.'

'Do you want to call anybody?'

'No, no. They don't want you to use the phones after emergencies anyway, Mom. Besides,' she took a sip, 'there's nobody to call.'

Her mother sat back, gestured to her daughter's left hand. 'Your father and I noticed there's no ring. We didn't want to press last night. I guess we're not going to be meeting Joe.'

'I guess not.' A sigh. 'It was my decision. It wasn't going to work out.' Irene took a minute stalling with her iced tea – lemon, sugar, mint.

'You gave it enough of a chance? You're sure?'

Christina shrugged. 'Come on, Mom, you know. Over a year. It just wasn't…' She trailed off. 'I'm not sad about it, so I don't think you should be.'

'I'm not sad about you and Joe, hon. I worry about you, that's all. These relationships that get to…' She took a deep breath and plunged ahead to intimacy,' that go on a year or more, then end. They must be taking their toll.'

'I know.' Christina was nodding. 'They are.'

'I just look at you now – and I know this is foolish, don't laugh at me – and I don't see my happy little girl. It just breaks my poor silly heart.' Christina started to stop her, but her mother touched her shoulder and continued. 'No, I know what you've been through. I do, or a little. With Brian, and the pregnancy, and now this. I do know, hon, how it must hurt, how you're trying. But it just seems to me that every time you give up, when you let it end, then part of you dies. The part that hopes, and you don't want to lose that.'

A tear coursed down Christina's cheek. She wiped it with a finger. 'The good news is I didn't put much hope in Joe.'