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Prologue

In the late evening when the shadoere long, I sat quiet and un near one of Paul'stoslyly of the future I was trying to ignore Flickering ghostly in the pale light of the rising rets that told me daily I could and should have done differently But I am what I have always been, a person ruled by instincts It seee

I found a strand of silver in randrandmother would I ht I waited for Chris to come and join me and tell ; I'm not just a paper flower but one that's real

He put his arm about my shoulder and I restedour story is alive to both of us, either the best or the worst of what is yet to be

It is their story now, Jory's and Bart's, and they will tell it as they knew it

1 Jory

Whenever Dad didn't drive me home from school, a yellow school bus would let me off at an isolated spot where I would recoverbefore I stepped onto the bus

To reachnarrow road without any houses until I cae desertedme wonder who had lived there; why had they deserted it? When I saw that house I auto soon I'd be home

An acre fro isolated and lonely on a road that had more twists and turns than a puzzle maze that leads the mouse to the cheese We lived in Fairfax, Malin County, about twenty miles north of San Francisco There was a redwood forest on the other side of the mountains, and the ocean too Ours was a cold place, so waves and often shrouded the landscape all day, turning everything cold and eerie The fog was spooky, but it was also romantic and mysterious

Asnolia trees dripping with Spanish ray; a man who called me his son I didn't remember his face nearly as well as I reuess one of the saddest things about growing bigger, and older, was that no one was large enough, or strong enough, to pick you up and hold you close and ain

Chris was my mother's third husband My own father died before I was born; his name was Julian Marquet, and everyone in the ballet world knew about him Hardly anyone outside of Clairmont, South Carolina, knew about Dr Paul Scott Sheffield, who had been my mother's second husband In that salenna, lived randmother, Madame Marisha

She was the one rote me a letter each week, and once a summer we visited her It seemed she wanted almost as much as I did, for me to become the most famous dancer the world had ever known And thus I would prove to her, and to everyone, that my father had not lived and died in vain

By noon seventy-four Once she'd been very faet this It was a rule I was never to call her Grande She'd whispered to ht if I called her Mother, but that didn't seeht when I already had a mother whom I loved very much So I called her Madame Marisha, or Madame M, just as everyone else did