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was a trembling, uncertain attempt at a smile, but it was a smile nonetheless.
    "What a good girl you are," he said softly. "What a very good girl." And then he hugged her.
    Without either of them realizing it, six-year-old Susannah had taken the first step toward becoming the efficient wife that Joel Faulconer so badly needed.
    Chapter 2
    The next year was magical. Joel legally adopted her so that she was now his real daughter
    —no longer Susannah Lydiard, but Susannah Faulconer. She went to school for the first time, and the teacher praised her because she was the smartest student in the class. She stopped wetting the bed and began to smile more. Everyone except her mother seemed to like her.
    Although Susannah tried hard to please her mother, nothing seemed to work. She kept herself as neat as a shiny new penny and did everything that was asked of her, but Kay still complained.
    "Don't sneak up behind me like that!" Kay shrieked at least once a day. "I've told you a hundred times! It gives me the creeps!"
    Susannah perfected a quiet little cough when her mother was around so Kay would always know she was there.
    Kay liked Paige much more than she liked Susannah—not that Susannah could really blame her. Paige was so adorable that Susannah immediately made herself a willing slave to her baby half sister. She fetched toys for her, entertained her when she was bored, and placated her when she had a temper tantrum. The sight of her sister's chubby pink face crumpled in tears was more than she could bear.
    "You're spoiling her," Kay complained one afternoon as she looked up from the society pages and flicked her cigarette ash. "You shouldn't give her everything she wants."
    Susannah reluctantly withdrew her new Barbie doll from Paige's destructive grasp.
    Paige's blue eyes darkened and she began to howl in protest. The howls grew louder as she ignored all of Susannah's attempts to distract her with other toys. Finally, the newspaper snapped closed.
    "For God's sake!" Kay screeched. "Let her play with your Barbie. If she breaks it, I'll buy you another one."
    Only her father remained immune to Paige's charms. "Paige has to learn that she can't have everything she wants," he told Susannah in his most severe voice after observing several of these exchanges. "You need to start exercising some judgment. God knows your mother won't."
    Susannah promised him she would try to do better, and the very next day she walked out of the room when Paige threw a temper tantrum, even though it nearly broke her heart.
    By the time Susannah had finished first grade, the wounds inside her were beginning to mend. Ironically, Kay's criticism proved to be nearly as healing as Joel's affection. From Kay Susannah learned that she wouldn't be shoved in a closet simply because her mother didn't like her. As the world became a safer place that summer, she gradually began to relax her diligence and behave like a normal child.
    It was a terrible mistake.
    Falcon Hill was set at the end of a long tree-bordered drive sealed off at the entrance with iron gates. In the late afternoon when the adults gathered on the terrace behind the house for martinis, Susannah developed the habit of wandering down the drive to the gates where she played with a doll or climbed up on the filigreed ironwork to extend her view.
    After having spent so many years being restricted to prescribed walks around the same city block, she found her new freedom dazzling.
    She was jumping rope at the bottom of the drive one June afternoon when the balloon man appeared. Even though she was seven years old, jumping rope was a new skill for her—one requiring all her concentration—so at first she didn't see him. The soles of her leather sandals scuffed on the blacktop as she counted softly under her breath. Her fine auburn hair, neatly secured back from her face with a pair of barrettes shaped like cocker spaniels, lifted off her shoulders each time the rope snapped.
    When she finally looked