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put her forehead into her palm, and then drew her long fingers across her face until they were massaging her temples. “Please,” she whispered. “Please just tell me where he is.”
    After a long pause the woman went on in a changed tone. “There only ever was one place he seemed to like going. Mr. and Mrs. Laurel had a terrible row this morning, and I suppose he hasn’t had the heart to tell the boy that he won’t be able to fund him anymore.”
    “Thank you.” Cordelia put the receiver down and allowed herself one long moment with her eyelids pressed closed. After that, instinct took over. She drove fast toward the gates, ignoring the shouting of the guard who wanted to know where she was going and if Charlie had approved it. Ignoring him was easy, because she could barely hear anything over her self-recriminating thoughts.
    When Letty cracked an eye she saw that the light filtering in through the window was not yet strong. It cast the white expanse of wall next to her with the pale greenish color of six A.M ., which meant that she was already late in getting up and that her father would be coming soon to rouse her. She burrowed deeper and closed her eyes and wished she could stay like that a while longer instead of going to the dairy. She pulled the sheet up close to her chin and let the silkiness settle over her, so that its cool surface caressed her skin. It was the silk sheet that jolted her. She opened both eyes again and blinked, remembering that she wasn’t in Union at all but in Manhattan, in the home of movie stars, one of whom she’d witnessed disappearing into a room with a man who was not her husband.
    In Union, and even at Dogwood, she’d always dressed carefully before leaving her room and beginning her day, but she was too hungry for all that, so instead she stepped over the thick carpet and sat in front of her vanity in the pale peach ankle-length slip that Sophia had given her, along with several other items that the actress no longer had use for. She threw the cream-colored kimono that hung in her closet over her shoulders and tiptoed out into the apartment, just like that. The hall was quiet and lit by sconces, and she padded over its soft carpets toward the sunken living room, which was decorated with simple furniture that nonetheless seemed very expensive, and pampas grass erupting from gold urns, and gigantic portraits of Valentine and Sophia. The room was a little strange to her—somehow too grand to really be a home—and she was happy to step into a kitchen fragrant with the smell of cooking bacon.
    “Ah, Miss Larkspur, the lady of the hour!” Valentine said in booming, perfectly enunciated syllables. He was sitting at the round pedestal table by the large double windows with the morning papers strewn before him. Letty couldn’t stop herself from smiling at that—she was helpless around compliments; she lit up when she got one, like a child who has been offered sweets. The kitchen made her happy, too—it was clean and simple compared to the rest of the house. The uniformed maid was busy chopping potatoes on the tiled sideboard, and the aroma of coffee emanated from the stove.
    “Are you hungry?” he asked solicitously.
    “Yes, I’m starving!” Letty said, sliding into a chair and putting her elbows on the sturdy surface of the table.
    Valentine grinned. “Beryl, make Miss Larkspur an omelet, would you?”
    “Yes, Mr. O’Dell,” the maid replied as she advanced toward the table with a porcelain coffee cup and saucer in one hand and a coffee pitcher in the other.
    “My dear, what a phenomenon you are! You see, already your name is on everyone’s lips…” Jovially he turned open the paper near Letty’s hand to the society page and bent forward, putting his head close to hers as he drew his index finger across a photograph that took up almost a quarter of the page. In it, a girl with short dark hair sweeping over her pale cheeks was being moved across a dance floor by a