But mostly everyone tiptoed around her. "No one really knew what to do," says her friend Joey Tardiff. "We just started acting overnice." The posturing made school excruciating. So Hilary employed her own bit of social artifice: she began acting like nothing whatever was wrong. She turned in every assignment on time with her usual fastidiousness. When kids spoke about their fathers, she interjected stories about hers (sometimes in the past tense, sometimes not). If it seemed appropriate, she affected just the right measure of grief. "Even if I was happy, I'd make myself feel just a little bit sad even if I didn't really want to," she says, "because it's how I think I was supposed to be." And no matter how empty she felt, she never ever lost it in public. Before long, teachers were marveling at how well she was coping.

Home was another matter. Hilary couldn't fall asleep in her own bed and started climbing into Ginny's. She was having bad dreams—a recurring nightmare from when she was very young about her house burning to the ground with the three of them trapped inside. Hilary had also taken to blaming herself for her dad's disappearance and was preoccupied with guilty thoughts. "I kept thinking that if the cat had gotten sick or I'd gotten sick that morning, he wouldn't have gone to work," says Hilary. She had seen students at her school have violent asthma attacks. If only her lungs had closed up on Sept. 11, she thought.

For her part, Ginny was going through the motions but nothing more. Friends and relatives, who had colonized the house, were propping her up like a marionette and pulling her through the paperwork mill. "I was numb, hollow," says Ginny upon several months' reflection. "I was just completely terrified, terrified of living the rest of my life without George—still am, but in the beginning I couldn't do a thing."

On Sept. 21, Patty Tardiff got a call from Ginny, who sounded more terrified than usual, almost as if she had seen a ghost. "I just got a dozen beautiful red roses for my 27th wedding anniversary," said a winded Ginny. Then there was a long pause. "They're from George." But it was clear from the loopy cursive who had really sent them, along with the following message:

Dear Ginny,
I love you and I am always with you and Hilary. You are still strong and I love you a lot. We will always be GG&H.
Geo

The roses were just the beginning. Hilary threw her mother a full-blown anniversary party. "Fancy dinner at the dining-room table, Lenox china, the whole deal," says Ginny. Several friends showed up and, with Hilary's help, prepared salad and Dijon chicken. Hilary flitted about the party like the consummate hostess and, toward the end of the evening, produced several presents for her mother: linen Halloween dish towels, scented candles, and Nexxus shampoo and conditioner. Not knowing what else to do, the adults played along with the charade.

Three days later was the first of George's three memorial services, sponsored by Aon and held at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan. The next two were in New Jersey: one at St. Elizabeth's Church in Avon, where Ginny and Hilary worship every Sunday, and the last at the Protestant church that George had attended growing up. Since there was still no sign of a body, Ginny propped up a framed photo of George on the altar: he was basting a Thanksgiving turkey and grinning ear to ear. At the receptions afterward, Hilary was the one grinning. Again she played hostess, making animated small talk with different clusters of relatives.

Ginny was hearing mixed messages: on the one hand, Hilary's sixth-grade teacher, Michael Sanderson, called home with glowing reports about her latest perfect test score. But friends and relatives were becoming increasingly worried. Why did Hilary avert her eyes every time the subject of her father came up? What was behind the cheery façade? Why did she never ask why? Ginny scheduled several appointments with a psychiatrist, Gail McVey. She and Hilary talked mostly about books—Hilary and Ginny read one or two a week—and about memories of her father. After four visits, McVey gave Hilary a Harry Potter journal in which to jot down her feelings and told Ginny, "You have a remarkable daughter. She talks all about her father — She can keep seeing me if she likes, but she's doing so well, I'm not sure it's necessary."

The façade was at least in part for her mother's benefit. "The last thing I wanted to do was anything to make my mom more upset," says Hilary. She worried about what Ginny would think if she got too emotional or, conversely, if she appeared to be having too much fun. Hilary stopped playing the piano and didn't pick it up again until the spring. Normally well behaved, she began asking permission to do even the most absurdly trivial things, such as riding her bike around the block or flying a kite. One day Hilary forgot to pack her Speedo for her practice with the Monmouth Barracudas, the highly selective regional swim club she belongs to. Scared of her mother's reaction, she soaked her hair in the sink to make it look as though she had participated and swore Patty, who was carpool mom that day, to secrecy. "Please, let's just pretend everything is fine," she begged.

Hilary had good reason to be concerned: her mother wasn't eating. Ginny had a gag reflex every time she put food in her mouth. Some mornings she was unable even to brush her teeth without thinking she would vomit. About the only thing she could force down was Carnation Instant Breakfast—the same thing she gave Hilary after the orthodontist tightened her braces. Ginny was slender to begin with from years of power walking, but now the weight was melting off her twiggy body. By December she had lost 29 lbs. In hopes that humor might defuse some of the pain, friends started calling her the "Incredible Shrinking Woman." Sanderson took a somewhat sterner approach. He paid a call one day during lunch and sat on the porch with Ginny. "You're just wasting away," he told her. "You have to take better care of yourself."

While many widows were clinging to support groups and touring ground zero, Ginny bunkered down and hardly left the immediate environs of Avon. She had, and still has, no desire to see the site. ("What would I want with construction dirt?" she is fond of asking. "It's not my husband.") In part, she was sluggish with grief. But there was something else tethering her to home. Ginny has a terrible sense of direction—on top of everything else, George had been the family compass—and she was petrified of losing her way. Then one day Hilary's principal called to say he had heard about a special daylong grief camp for 9/11 victims: Comfort Zone Camp, based in Richmond, Va. Originally created for children who have lost loved ones, Comfort Zone rallied to set up satellites in New York and New Jersey just after Sept. 11. The first session was virtually next door to the northern New Jersey hamlet where Ginny had grown up. It was one of the few places on earth she knew she could find from memory. So on Nov. 10, Hilary and Ginny rose early to give themselves plenty of travel time and embarked on their first mother-daughter trip. They found the place with no problem. The counselors announced they would be splitting up the widows and children for the day. (There were no widowers in this group.) As they went their separate ways, Ginny whispered to Hilary that at any time she could ask to be excused, and they would leave. The offer proved unnecessary; Hilary had her best day since Sept. 11. It was the first time she could really talk to kids her own age. Or she could not talk at all and play foursquare or just act silly. At the end of the day, they sat cross-legged in a "healing circle" and were invited to share a story about their fathers. At first, they all looked at their shoes. Then, just as she did at school whenever the teacher looked desperate, Hilary confidently spoke up, volunteering, "My dad was known for his Argyle socks, and we donated some of those socks to the rescuers at ground zero." She felt an immediate rush; soon the other kids were eagerly relating memories of their fathers.

Ginny felt emboldened as well: "It was the first time I'd actually identified myself with 9/11 and met anyone else who lost their husband that day. There were 40 widows there, and some of them broke my heart. There was a lot of anger, a lot of unsifted emotion, but nothing I said there was wrong. I felt very safe." Both mother and daughter were thoroughly drained by the day, but the first thing Hilary said to Ginny was, "I can't wait for the next camp!" Ginny still dismissed most of the 9/11 events and invitations that crowded her mailbox. But she could not resist two free tickets to a Dec. 7 Bruce Springsteen concert at Convention Hall in Asbury Park, N.J. She and George had been fans from the very beginning, back when Springsteen was just a local bar act, and they relished any opportunity to see him live. It was only fitting that his should be Hilary's first rock concert. Hilary and Ginny were seated in the 9/11 section, and it was clear that the women with puffy eyes hadn't worn all black simply to be fashionable. The widows had come to a wake, and the minute the music started, they were bawling. But Ginny was determined to have a good time on their first night out in months. She sang all the words and pulled Hilary up out of her seat so they could dance. "Hilary kept turning around and looking at the women crying and asking me, 'Are you sure we're allowed to do this? Are you sure we're allowed to be dancing?'" recalls Ginny. "Nothing was going to spoil her first rock concert. I said, 'We're dancing because this is what people do at a Bruce show,' and we danced together for the whole night without looking back."

It was one of the last bright moments of 2001. December brought the memory of myriad traditions—the lighting of the tree in Rockefeller Center, the annual Avon hayride, the Aon party at the World Trade Center—that Hilary used to share with her father. As with everything else, she insisted things proceed as usual, even if a male cousin or a friend's father had to act as an understudy, and then regretted it the second the event started. One of Hilary's favorite parts about Christmas was her father's ineptitude with gifts. Ginny was in charge of the present buying, but George usually made a token purchase of his own. One Christmas he surprised Ginny with an electric pencil sharpener. "They were always so clearly the wrong thing, but it was just so funny that he'd taken the time and thought to buy them," says Hilary, who one year received a stuffed dolphin with tie-dyed fur. "When I came down for Christmas this year, something was very off. For the first time in my life, I had gotten every single thing I wanted, and then I really knew it."

It had taken a little more than three months, but her father was finally dead.

On Jan. 15, Ginny got a letter from the medical examiner's office. George's toothbrush and dirty T shirt that she had submitted the previous fall did not have enough genetic material to make a match. The examiner needed additional DNA from a child or sibling. Ginny could not face taking her daughter to the Manhattan morgue where the parts of so many husbands and fathers were being stored in refrigerated trailers, so she opted to have the DNA kit sent to their home. It arrived on Valentine's Day. The procedure was simple enough. Hilary and Ginny both wiped the insides of their cheeks with cotton-tipped wooden swabs—Ginny, so that her DNA could be isolated from George's—and sealed them in cardboard boxes. When they were finished, Ginny asked:

"Do you want them to find a body?"

"I don't know," said Hilary. "What do you want?"

"I hope and pray he just vaporized, is one with the universe and never knew what hit him."

"Me too."

Then they moved on to another topic, ending their first discussion of George's remains.