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  “Then she’ll make lots of other friends on her own. Besides, these girls aren’t really close friends of mine, particularly not Haley. Neither is Barbara. It’s Doug I really like.”

  Cole gaped at her, thinking of Barbara’s extremely tall and very gangly brother. “Doug is your boyfriend?”

  She shot him an odd look and sat down on a bale of hay near the open doors. “No, he’s my friend, not my boyfriend.”

  “I thought you were a little short for him,” Cole joked, rather enjoying her company. “What’s your real boyfriend like?” he asked as he reached for a big red plastic glass he’d left on the windowsill earlier.

  “Actually, I don’t have a boyfriend. What about you, do you have a girlfriend?”

  Cole nodded and took a swallow of water.

  “What’s she like?” Diana asked.

  He propped his foot on the bale of hay near her hip and leaned his forearm on his knee, looking out through a side window that faced the house, and Diana had the feeling that he had drifted very far away. “Her name is Valerie Cooper.”

  There was a long pause.

  “And?” Diana prompted. “Is she blond or dark, short or tall, blue eyes or brown?”

  “She’s blond and tall.”

  “I wish I was,” she confessed with a wistful look.

  “You want to be blond?”

  “No,” she said, and Cole laughed. “I want to be tall.”

  “Unless you’re planning an amazing growth spurt, you’d better aim for blond,” Cole advised lightly. “In your case, blond would be a little easier to achieve.”

  “What color are her eyes?”

  “Blue.”

  Diana was fascinated. “Have you been going together very long?”

  Cole belatedly realized he was not only socializing with one of his employer’s guests, which was totally unacceptable, but that the guest was fourteen years old and the conversation was entirely too personal. “Since high school,” he said briefly as he straightened and turned to leave.

  “Does she live in Houston?” Diana pressed, sensing the conversation was over but rather hoping it wasn’t.

  “She goes to UCLA. We see each other whenever we can, usually during the holidays.”

  * * *

  The birthday party continued for hours, ending with a huge cake served on the lawn, where Barbara opened piles of gifts; then everyone went inside while the servants cleaned up outdoors. Diana had started to follow along when she noticed that half the chocolate birthday cake was still left, and she thought about those lonely hot dogs in Cole’s empty refrigerator. On a whim, she walked back to the table and cut a huge chunk off the corner because he’d get more frosting on such a piece; then she took it down to the stable.

  Cole’s reaction to the chocolate cake was almost comically ecstatic. “You are looking at the owner of the world’s biggest sweet tooth, Diana,” he said as he took the plate and fork.

  He was already eating the cake as he headed down the hall toward his room. Diana watched him for a moment, aware for the first time that people she actually knew, actually came in contact with, didn’t always have enough to eat. As she turned away, she decided to bring extra snacks whenever she went to the Haywards, but she sensed instinctively that she’d have to find a way to give them to him that wouldn’t make him think it was charity.

  She knew nothing about college men, but she knew something about pride, and everything about Cole made her think he had a great deal of it.

  Chapter 4

  LIFE IS GOOD,” COREY ANNOUNCED to Diana two months after Barbara Hayward’s birthday party. She’d lowered her voice so they wouldn’t be heard by their parents, who had already gone to sleep. The two girls were huddled beneath the quilt on Diana’s bed, their backs propped against a pile of feather pillows with lace-edged cases, eating jumbo pretzels and having a gossip session. “I can’t wait until you meet Grandma and Grandpa tomorrow. By the time they leave here next week, you’ll be crazy about them, you’ll see. You’ll think of them as if they had always been your very own grandparents.”

  The truth was that Corey desperately wanted that to be so. She wanted to give Diana something of value to repay her for everything she’d done.

  School had started last month, and by that time, Diana had already become Corey’s best friend and champion. She helped Corey choose her clothes, helped her fix her hair in different styles, guided her through the social maze at school, and in the end, even Diana’s friends—some of whom were snobs—accepted Corey into their inner circle.

  Corey spent the first month in a state of gratitude and mounting awe toward her new sister. Unlike Corey, Diana never got flustered, never worried about saying the wrong thing, never made a dumb joke, and never looked like a fool. Her thick, dark reddish-brown hair was always glossy; her complexion was flawless; her figure was perfect. When she climbed out of the swimming pool with her hair soaking wet and no makeup on, she looked like a television commercial. She never even got wrinkles in her clothes!

  By then, both girls were already thinking of their respective stepparents as real parents, and now Corey wanted to give Diana some “real grandparents.”

  “When you meet Gram and Gramps,” Corey told her, “you’ll see why everybody thinks they’re so neat. Gram can figure out a way to make almost anything, and it turns out pretty. She can knit and sew and crochet. She can walk into the woods and come out with ordinary twigs and leaves and stuff, and turn it into amazing things by using just a dab of glue or a little paint. She makes the presents she gives to people, and she makes her own wrapping paper; then she uses things like berries for decoration and everything looks awesome! Mom is just like her. Whenever there’s a church auction, everybody in town tries to buy whatever Mom and Gram donated.

  “A man who owns a fancy designer gallery in Dallas came to an auction in Long Valley and saw their work. He said they’re both really, really talented, and he wanted them to make some things he could sell in his showroom, but Gram said she wouldn’t enjoy making things that way. Mom was so tired when she got home from work that she couldn’t promise to do what he wanted. Oh, and Gram’s a fantastic cook, too. She’s really into ‘natural,’ homegrown stuff—natural food and homegrown veggies and fresh-picked flowers—only you never know whether she’s going to decorate with it and put it on the table or put it on your plate. Either way, whatever she makes is just great.”

  She paused to take a swallow from her can of Coke before she continued, “Gramps loves to garden, and he experiments with ways to grow everything bigger and better. Most of all, he likes to build things.”

  “What sort of things?” Diana asked, fascinated.

  “He can build just about anything that can be made out of wood. He can make little rocking chairs for babies, or garden sheds that look like cottages, or tiny furniture for a dollhouse. Gram usually does the painting for him because she’s the most artistic one. I can’t wait for you to see the dollhouse he built for me! It has fifteen rooms and real shingles and flower boxes on the windows!”

  “I’m really looking forward to meeting them. They sound terrific,” Diana replied, but Corey was distracted from that discussion by something that had bothered her since the first day she’d peeked into Diana’s bedroom, before Diana came home from Europe. “Diana,” Corey teased in a dire voice as she surveyed the relentless orderliness of the pretty room, “didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s unhealthy to keep a bedroom this neat?”

  Instead of making some sort of deserved rejoinder about Corey’s sloppy habits, Diana took a dainty bite of her pretzel and thoughtfully looked around the room. “It probably is,” she agreed. “It could be because I have an artistic eye that appreciates symmetry and order. Or it could be because I’m obsessive-compulsive—”

  Corey wrinkled her brow. “What’s ‘obsessive-compulsive’ mean?”

  “Nuts.” Diana paused in her explanation to rub her fingertips free of pretzel dust. “Crazy.”

  “You’re n