“No, Sasha said that she thought he was using her as a foil to make himself look good. Dominic Nalano was an equestrian performer himself, but he was never anything but second rate until he brought his baby daughter into the act. Then he took off like a rocket.” Her lips tightened. “I don’t know when he stumbled on the fact that Sasha was a positive genius with the horses. But she was only four when he started using her full-time in his performances. You can imagine how the sight of that tiny little girl doing tricks and balancing on the back of those beautiful horses with her handsome father would bring the audience to their feet.” She looked down into the coffee in her cup. “Particularly since there would have been no fear, but only pure joy in her expression. When I first saw her perform when she was ten, that was my impression. The freedom, the grace, the sheer joy…Later she told me that the only time she could remember being happy was when she was with the horses. She understood them much better than she did anyone else. A mother who deserted her when she was two, a father who was an alcoholic who paid attention to her only when he needed her to do something, the circus folk who thought she was a little touched because she hardly spoke. She didn’t even realize how unusual it was that she and the horses understood each other so well. Because she was so bright, she picked up somewhere along the way that she was just different from other people and adjusted to it. So she kept on doing what she loved and ignoring everything else around her until she was six, when her father was killed. He got a little too drunk one night and ran his truck into a telephone pole. Then she couldn’t ignore everything any longer because Alonzo Zeppo, the owner of the circus, wouldn’t let her. Sasha and her father had become minor headliners in his little circus during the last few years, and Zeppo had invested in a few very expensive horses to use in their act. He was furious that he was going to have to sell them now that her father had been so stupid as to get himself killed. Sasha was terrified at the thought of losing the horses, so she showed Zeppo all the other tricks she knew that her father had never let her put in the performance.”

“This is beginning to read like a matinee where the understudy takes over the leading role and becomes a star,” Korgan said.

“That just shows you don’t know her. She didn’t care anything about being a star. All she wanted was to keep her horses. And she did it.”