Spoiler alert! If you have never read this book and hope someday to do so, and hope to be surprised by plot turns, I have to warn you that this post will give one big one away. Still here, anybody? All right. In our earlier posts I made clear that in the opening scene, Andrew's beloved second wife Briony is dead. Andrew thrusts his infant by Briony upon his first wife, Martha. There is no explanation of the reason for her death, and while reading the middle of the book about their courtship and life together the easiest assumption is that she was going to die in childbirth. She didn't. Briony gave birth and there was a cozy household of three for a time. But she died soon thereafter in the collapse of the Twin Towers in the financial district of New York City on September 11, 2001. That struck me as quite a twist in a story that until then had been vague about chronology. Hence the spoiler warning above. It was over the following two months that Andrew make...