He wondered how he could be so tired and not sleep, not be sleepy at all. He was never sleepy – tired beyond imagining, far beyond what he'd ever thought were the limits of his physical endurance, but his brain never slowed.

Sometime in the course of a night or post-midnight morning, the apparatus that was his body would shut down and he would lie unconscious for a few hours, but this never felt like sleep.

Last night – a blessing – the boom had lowered while he lay in bed next to his wife, praying for it.

Now – pop – he was up.

The digital changed – a flicker at the periphery of his vision, the only light in the room -5:15. Still deep dark, yes, but morning really. Far better than when the pop was 3:30, when he knew he was up for the day and it was still night.

He swung his legs off the bed.

At 6:15, Dooher was in the fifth row of St Ignatius on the campus of the University of San Francisco because of a hunch that Christina Carrera would appear, as she'd implied jokingly when she'd said her goodbyes last night.

Dooher realized that the odds might be long against her actually getting up and coming down to church for ashes, but long odds had never fazed him.

After all, what had been the odds, back when he was fifteen, that the baseball team he played for, from San Carlos, California, would go all the way to the Babe Ruth World Series? And then, beyond that, that Dooher would come up in the bottom of the seventh inning, two out, one run down, with his best friend Wes Farrell standing on second base? And that he would hit a home run to win the whole thing?

Long odds.