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against the seat.
    The guilt had started immediately upon Robert’s first call. She should have been up there. It was the first thing she said to Don Farlow when she hung up. He was sweet and came and put his arm around her, saying all the right things.
    “It would have made no difference Annie. You couldn’t have done anything.”
    “Yes I could? I could have stopped her going. Whatwas Robert thinking of, letting her go out riding on a day like this?”
    “It’s a beautiful day. You wouldn’t have stopped her.”
    Farlow was right of course but the guilt remained because it wasn’t, she knew, about whether or not she should have gone up with them last night. It was the mere tip of a long seam of guilt that snaked its way back through the thirteen years her daughter had been alive.
    Annie had taken six weeks off work when Grace was born and had loved every minute. True, a lot of the less lovable minutes had been delegated to Elsa, their Jamaican nanny, who remained to this day the linchpin of their domestic life.
    Like many ambitious women of her generation, Annie had been determined to prove the compatibility of motherhood and career. But while other media mothers used their work to promote this ethic, Annie had never flaunted it, shunning so many requests for photo spreads of her with Grace that women’s magazines soon stopped asking. Not so long ago she had found Grace flipping through such a piece about a TV anchorwoman, proudly pictured with her new baby.
    “Why didn’t we ever do this?” Grace said, not looking up. Annie answered, rather too tartly, that she thought it was immoral, like product placement. And Grace had nodded thoughtfully, still not looking at her. “Uh-huh,” she said, matter-of-fact, flipping on to something else. “I guess people think you’re younger if you make out you haven’t got kids.”
    This comment and the fact that it was uttered without a trace of malice had given Annie such a shock that for several weeks she thought of little else than her relationshipwith Grace or, as she now saw it, her lack of one.
    It hadn’t always been so. In fact until four years ago when she’d taken her first editorship, Annie had prided herself that she and Grace were closer than almost any mother and daughter she could think of. As a celebrated journalist, more famous than many of those she wrote about, her time until then had been her own. If she so chose, she could work from home or take days off whenever she wanted. When she traveled, she would often take Grace with her. Once they’d spent the best part of a week, just the two of them, at a famously fancy hotel in Paris, waiting for some prima donna fashion designer to grant Annie a promised audience. Every day they walked miles shopping and sightseeing and spent the evenings guzzling delicious room service in front of the TV, snuggled in a gilded, emperor-size bed like a pair of naughty sisters.
    Executive life was very different. And in the strain and euphoria of transforming a stuffy, little-read magazine into the hottest read in town, Annie had at first refused to acknowledge the toll it was taking at home. She and Grace now had what she proudly referred to as “quality time.” From her present perspective, its main quality seemed to Annie to be oppression.
    They had one hour together in the mornings when she forced the child to do her piano practice and two hours in the evening when she forced her to do homework. Words intended as motherly guidance seemed increasingly doomed to be taken as criticism.
    At weekends things were better and the horse riding helped keep intact what fragile bridge there remained between them. Annie herself no longer rode but, unlike Robert, had from her own childhood an understanding of the peculiar tribal world of riding and showjumping.She enjoyed driving Grace and her horse to events. But even at its best, their time together never matched the easy trust that Grace shared with Robert.
    In myriad minor