"Liberty," I said faintly. My fingers were swallowed in his. A light, burning clasp, and he released me as quickly as possible.

I turned away blindly, wanting to look anywhere other than into those unsettling eyes, and I discovered a woman sitting on a nearby love seat.

She was a beautiful tall waif with a delicate face and puffy pneumatic lips, and a river of highlighted blond hair that streamed down her shoulders and over the arm of the sofa. Churchill had told me Gage was dating a model, and I had no doubt this was her. The woman's arms, no bigger around than Q-tips stems, hung straight from their sockets, and her hipbones protruded beneath her clothes like can-opener blades. Had she been anyone other than a model, she would have been rushed to a clinic for eating disorders.

I have never worried about my weight, which has always been normal. I have a good figure, a woman's shape with a woman's br**sts and hips, and probably more of a rear end than I would have wished for. I look good in the right clothes, not so good in the wrong ones. Overall I like my body just fine. But next to this spindly creature I felt like a prizewinning Holstein.

"Hi," I said, forcing a smile as her gaze swept me up and down. "I'm Liberty Jones. I'm...a friend of Churchill's."

She gave me a disdainful glance and didn't bother introducing herself.

I thought of the years of deprivation and hunger it would require to maintain such thinnness. No ice cream, no barbecue, never a wedge of lemon pie or a fried chile relleno pepper stuffed with melting white cheese. It would turn anyone mean.

Jack broke in quickly. "So where you from, Liberty'?"

"I..." I cast a quick glance at Carrington, who was examining a panel of buttons on Churchill's wheelchair. "Don't push any of those, Carrington." I had a sudden cartoonish vision of her triggering a catapult device in the seat cushion.

"I'm not," my sister protested. "I'm just looking."

I returned my attention to Jack. "We live in Houston, near the salon."

"What salon?" Jack asked with an encouraging smile.

"Salon One. Where I work." A short but discomforting silence followed, as if there were nothing anyone could think of to say or ask about a salon job. I was compelled to throw words into the void. "Before Houston, we lived in Welcome."

"I think I've heard of Welcome," Jack said. "Although I can't remember how or why."

"It's just a regular little town," I said. "Got one of everything."

"What do you mean?"

I shrugged awkwardly. "One shoe store, one Mexican restaurant, one dry cleaner's..."

These people were used to conversation with their own kind, about people and places and things I had no experience with. I felt like a nobody. Suddenly I was annoyed with Churchill for putting me in this situation, among people who were going to make fun of me the minute I left the room. I tried to keep my mouth shut, but as another mesh of silence settled. I couldn't stop myself from breaking through it.

I looked at Gage Travis again. "You work with your dad, right?" I tried to remember what Churchill had said, that although Gage had a hand in the family investment business, he had also started his own company that developed alternative energy technologies.

"It looks like I'll be stepping in to do Dad's traveling for a while," Gage said. "He was scheduled to speak at a conference in Tokyo next week. I'll be going instead." All lacquered politeness, no hint of a smile.

"When you make a speech for Churchill." I asked, "do you say exactly what he would have said?"

"We don't always share the same opinions."

"That means no, then."

"That means no," he said softly. As he continued to stare at me. I was surprised by a mild, not unpleasant squirming sensation in my abdomen. My face turned hot.

"Do you like to travel?" I asked.

"I've gotten tired of it, actually. What about you?"

"I don't know. I've never been outside the state."

I didn't think it was such a weird thing to say. but the three of them looked at me like I had two heads.

"Churchill hasn't taken you anywhere?" the woman on the love seat asked, toying with a lock of her own hair. "Doesn't he want to be seen with you?" She smiled as if she were making a joke. Her tone could have stripped the fuzz off a kiwi.

"Gage is a homebody." Jack told me. "The rest of the Travises have a big dose of wanderlust."

"But Gage does like Paris," the woman commented, giving him an arch glance. "That's where we met. I was doing the cover for French Vogue."

I tried to look impressed. "I'm sorry. I didn't catch your name."

"Dawnelle."

"Dawnelle..." I repeated, waiting for her last name.

"Just Dawnelle."

"She's just been chosen for a big national ad campaign." Jack told me. "A major cosmetics company is launching a new perfume."

"Fragrance," Dawnelle corrected. "It's called Taunt."

"I'm sure you'll do a great job." I said.

After drinks we had dinner in an oval-shaped dining room with a two-story ceiling and a chandelier with crystals hanging down like strands of raindrops. The arched doorway on one side of the dining room led to the kitchen, while the one on the other side featured a wrought-iron gate. Churchill told me there was a dine-in wine cellar beyond the gate, with a collection of about ten thousand bottles. Heavy chairs upholstered in olive velvet were pulled up to a mahogany table.