It was a child’s room, a teenager’s room, a young woman’s room, every corner crammed with the memorabilia of growing up. Allison had never known such a room. Her own single mother had dragged her from job to job, from town to town. Life had been a string of dingy furnished apartments and motel rooms, her childhood treasures whatever could be crammed into a cardboard box and tossed into the back seat of a rusty Chevrolet Impala.

She would have died for a room like this, a place to keep and call her own.

Brianna was nineteen now, a striking young woman with her mother’s red hair and her father’s chiseled features and long-limbed stature. She’d been accepted into a prestigious journalism program at Northwestern University, where she was working toward a career as a TV reporter.

Allison’s eyes roamed over the shelves of books and CDs, the photo albums, the school yearbooks—finally coming to rest where they always did, on the eight-by-ten leather-framed photograph that sat on top of the bookcase.

Brianna, she suspected, had left the photo out as a gesture, to remind her new stepmother that this was, and always would be, her family. The three figures in the informal portrait were standing on a dock with a boat behind them and a huge, black Newfoundland dog at their feet. A younger Burke, ruggedly handsome in jeans and a faded polo, stood with one arm around his carrot-topped twelve-year-old daughter and the other arm around his wife.

Kate.

In recent months, Allison had begun to identify with the heroine of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca—the young second wife, overshadowed by her glamorous predecessor. But Katherine O’Malley Caldwell was no Rebecca. Her photographic image showed a short, almost dumpy-looking woman whose baggy blue CHIEFS sweatshirt hung over a waist that had already begun to thicken with early middle age. Her wind-tossed cinnamon hair was touched with gray at the temples, her skin spattered with freckles and etched with laugh lines. Her generous, unpainted mouth had been caught in an impish grin.

Now there was a woman who knew how to throw a party!

Head still pounding, Allison turned away from the photo, switched off the lamp, and wandered down the hall toward the master bedroom. When she’d married Burke—the ceremony a romantic dream in the hilltop chapel at Big Cedar—her friends had told her she was fortunate to be getting a widower. No ex-wife to deal with. Wasn’t she lucky? But there were times, like tonight, when she wished she could call Kate on the phone and invite her to a long, chatty, insightful lunch. Maybe it would help her understand why Burke had shut her out of his life.