* * *
I woke up early the next morning thanks to a phone call from Abuela. She either didn’t get the whole concept of the three-hour time difference or she didn’t care.
"Were you still sleeping?” she asked after I gurgled out a hello. "It’s nearly lunchtime."
"Which is eight o'clock California time.” This was the one day Maren had let me sleep in because I'd been out late, and it figured that Abuela would call.
"I'll tell you what time it is. It's time you came home." She lowered her voice. "Escuchame." Listen to me. "Your mother went out with Larry again last night. You need to know that."
I lay back down on my bed and let my cell phone rest against my face. "Why do I need to know that?”
"Because that’s two times in one week,” she said. “He had her over to his house last Wednesday to watch TV.”
TV. He really knew how to woo a girl.
"What am I supposed to do about that?” I asked.
Abuela's voice took on a terse tone. "The only reason your mother is getting serious with him is because she thinks you need a father figure. You’re so starved for one that you ran off to California, and heaven knows what other fool-minded things you’ll do in an effort to have someone who was never worth it to begin with take notice of you."
"What?” I asked suddenly, shaking off the remnants of sleep. "Did my mom say that to you?"
"Your mother and I discuss you. It's not gossip, since we love you. Your mother thinks that man is going to break your heart the same way he broke hers, and she wants a healthy example of male nurturing in your life for when you wise up and come on back home. If you came home now, we could all save ourselves grief. You won’t have to meet Alex Kingsley, and I won’t have to see my daughter marry a man who can speak nonstop through dinner about tax law.”
"Okay. I’ll talk to her about it."
"I don't have many more years left on this earth, Lexi. Don’t make me spend them with Larry."
"I said I'd talk to her.”
"You’re going to college in a few months, so what do you need a male role model for anyway?”
"Okay, Abuela, I've got to go now. Good-bye.” I hung up the phone and stared at the ceiling for a while.
I didn't think my mother would really marry Larry just to provide me with a father, but that didn't mean she wouldn’t marry him for other reasons. Maybe if your teenage daughter is meeting her rich, famous father for the first time, you want to feel like you have a stable, successful man in your life.
I dragged myself out of bed and went to the kitchen for breakfast. There was no point in calling Mom now. She was at work.
Maren had gone. She’d left a cut grapefruit sitting on the table and a note saying she went to meet with Kari's lawyer. I ignored the grapefruit and made myself toast. She also left me instructions to practice my dancing routines, but since it was Saturday and Jacqueline wouldn’t even be at the dance studio, I ignored that too. I had other plans for the morning.
I went to Maren's office. Last week when I’d been autographing pictures of Kari to send out to fans, I'd noticed a boxful of Kari’s last CD. I took about thirty of them and shoved them into a tote bag.
Then I called my driver and asked him to pick me up in forty-five minutes. Maren never said I couldn’t leave the house. She'd just said I couldn’t go to Kari’s house. I showered, trying to remove all the lingering glitter from my hair, then dressed and re-created my hair and makeup the way I’d been taught—shading my nose to make it seem sharper, applying thick eyeliner and dramatic eye shadow.
I’d just finished when Bao-Zhi came. It occurred to me during the ride down to the hospital that I should call Kari to make sure she wasn’t out somewhere doing a public appearance while I showed up elsewhere, but I didn't call her. I knew she'd been up late the night before, so she was most likely still asleep. Besides, she wouldn't want me to visit the hospital, not when it had been the heart of her most recent problem. This was one of those times it was better to ask forgiveness than permission.
I had Bao-Zhi escort me into the hospital lobby. He wasn’t much of a bodyguard, but I didn’t dare ask Nikolay. Real bodyguards like to ask a lot of security questions and tend to frown upon just randomly showing up places. If I had called him, I knew he’d tell Maren what I was doing.
The receptionist eyed me cautiously, but when I asked, she picked up her phone and put in a call to the director.
Not long afterward, he walked down the hallway. He was a tall man with a full head of hair and a politician's smile. He looked me over from head to foot with surprise. That was one of the oddest things about being Kari, how often and blatantly people stared at me. I no longer blended into the crowd. Without checking, I could tell I’d caught the attention of the entire lobby.
He held out his hand and shook mine with a firm grasp. "So glad to meet you, Miss Kingsley. What brings you here?”
"I felt bad I couldn't do your fund-raiser, and I wondered if I could meet some of the children.”
His jaw dropped slightly, but after his shock wore off, he agreed to take me around. I met about twenty-five kids that morning. A boy in for hip surgery for his cerebral palsy. A girl getting skin grafts for third-degree burns. Way too many kids who were doing rounds of chemotherapy.
I sat on the bed and talked to some. I walked with one boy while his nurse pushed him around the grounds. Each time I came into a room, someone's face lit up with excitement. A mother visiting her daughter actually cried when she saw me. "Our whole family loves you,” she said. "God bless you for coming.”
Guilt and happiness both flooded through me at these times. People wouldn't have been so grateful if they'd known I was an imposter, but wasn’t it worth it to make them happy? Weren’t they better off that I'd come than if they kept thinking that Kari Kingsley was some unreachable celebrity who didn't care?
Each child seemed so brave. My problems—the worrying I'd done about money, about not being popular enough in high school, and about my father—all of them shrank in significance.
While I sat in the last room talking to a girl named Morgan and feeling that I really should have eaten more than toast before I left, I heard a noise and looked up.
Grant Delray stood in the doorway.