I remembered the time I'd been about Carrington's age, maybe a little younger, when Jack and Joe had dropped my favorite doll out the window and Gage had rescued her. I had gone into Jack's room, a chaos of toys and books and discarded clothes, and I'd seen him and Joe kneeling by the open window.

"Whatcha doing?" I had asked, venturing nearer. The two dark heads turned at the same time.

"Get outta here, Haven," Jack had commanded.

"Daddy says you have to let me play with you."

"Later. Get lost."

"What are you holding?" I had gone closer, my heart clutching as I saw something in their hands, tied up with strings. "Is that . . . is that Bootsie?"

"We're just borrowing her," Joe had said, his hands busy with string and some kind "I plasticky fabric.

"You can't!" I had felt the panic of the thoroughly powerless, the outrage of the dispossessed. "You didn't ask me. Give her back! Give her — " My voice shredded into a scream as I saw Bootsie being dangled over the windowsill, her na**d pink body harnessed with a contraption of strings and tape and paper clips. My baby doll had been recruited on a mission as a parachute jumper. "Doooooooon't!"

"For Pete's sake," Jack had said in a disgusted tone. "She's just a hunk of plastic." And, adding injury to insult, he'd given me a mean look and dropped her.

Bootsie had gone down like a stone. I couldn't have been more upset if the boys had dropped a real baby out the window. Howls ripped from my throat as I'd raced from the room and down the big staircase. And I kept howling as I tore outside to the side of the house, paying no attention to the voices of my parents, the housekeeper, the gardener.

Bootsie had fallen into the middle of a massive ligustrum bush. The only thing visible had been the crumpled parachute caught on a top branch, my doll hanging unseen in the green and white thicket. Since I was too short and small to reach into the branches, I could only stand there crying, while the heat from the Texas sun had settled on me with the weight of a wool blanket.

Alerted by the racket, Gage had come and rummaged through the ligustrum until he found Bootsie. He had dusted away the powdering of scurf from ligustrum leaves, and held me against him until my tears were blotted against his T-shirt.

"I love you more than anybody," I had whispered to him.

"I love you too," Gage had whispered back, and I could feel him smiling against my hair. "More than anybody."

As I entered Gage's room now, I saw Liberty sitting on the bed in a heap of shimmering organza, her shoes on the floor, her veil a rich froth floating on the mattress. It seemed impossible that she could have been any more stunning than she had been earlier at the church. But she looked even better this way, glowing and smudged. She was half Mexican with a butter-smooth complexion and big green eyes, and a figure that made you think of the old-fashioned word "bombshell." She was also shy. Cautious. You got the sense that things hadn't come easy for her, that she'd had close acquaintance with hardship.

Liberty made a comical face as she saw me. "My rescuer. You'll have to help me out of this dress — it has a thousand buttons and they're all in the back."

"No problem." I sat on the bed next to her, and she turned her back to make it easier for me. I felt awkward, struggling with unspoken tensions that no amount of niceness on her part would dispel.

I tried to think of something gracious to say. "I think today was the best day of Gage's life. You make him really happy."

"He makes me happy too," Liberty said. "More than happy. He's the most incredible man, the most . . . " She paused and lifted her shoulders in a little shrug, as if it were impossible to put her feelings into words.

"We're not the easiest family to marry into. A lot of strong personalities."

"I love the Travises," she said without hesitation. "All of you. I always wanted a big family. It was just Carrington and me after Mama died."

I'd never reflected on the fact that both of us had lost a mother while we were in our teens. Except it must have been much scarier for Liberty, because there'd been no rich father, no family, no nice house and cushy life. And she'd raised her little sister all by herself, which I had to admire.

"Did your mother get sick?" I asked. She shook her head. "Car wreck."

I went to the closet and took down the white pantsuit hanging over the back of the door. I brought it to Liberty, who shimmied out of her wedding dress. She was a vision of sumptuous curves contained in white lace, the swell of her pregnancy more developed than I would have expected.

Liberty dressed in white pants and matching blazer, and low-heeled beige pumps. Going to the dresser, she leaned close to the mirror and neatened her smudged eyeliner with a tissue. "Well," she said, "this is as good as it's going to get."

"You look gorgeous," I said.

"Droopy."

"In a gorgeous way."

She looked over her shoulder with a dazzling grin. "All your lipstick's gone, Haven." She motioned me to the mirror beside her. "Nick caught you alone in a corner, didn't he?" She handed me a tube of something shimmery and pale. Mercifully, before I had to answer, there was a knock at the door.

Liberty went to open it, and Carrington came in, accompanied by my aunt Gretchen.

Aunt Gretchen, my father's older sister and only sibling, was hands down my favorite relative from either side of the family. She had never been elegant like my mother. Gretchen was country born and as tough as any pioneer woman who ever crossed the Red River on the Cherokee Trace. Back then Texas women had learned to take care of themselves because the men were always gone when you needed them. The modern versions were still like that, iron-willed beneath their coating of Mary Kay cosmetics.