It would be years before I understood that my family, in their long campaign to make me small, had accidentally given me the finest education in reading and moving human beings that money cannot buy, and then had sent me out into the one profession on earth where that skill is worth more than any other.\n\nMy name is Josephine Prescott.

But to the three hundred people gathered in the ballroom of a grand hotel on Nob Hill on the afternoon I am going to tell you about, I was still Josephine Pembroke — thirty-two years old, unmarried, tediously ordinary, and the standing disappointment of the Pembroke family, a role I had held so long that most of them had forgotten it was a role at all and simply took it for the truth of me.

They were about to find out how wrong they were.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

To understand the afternoon, you have to understand the thirty-two years that built it.

Chapter 2 — The Golden Child

We lived in a restored five-bedroom mansion in Nob Hill, and to the world outside our walls, my parents were the picture of San Francisco society.

My father, Roderick Pembroke, was a corporate attorney whose name was cut in gold on the side of a downtown tower.

My mother, Beatrice, was a former beauty queen who had converted herself into a socialite of the ruthless kind, a woman who ran charity galas the way a general runs a campaign and regarded her two daughters as accessories to be displayed or, in my case, stored out of sight.

The favored accessory was my sister, Rosalie — two years younger than me, fair and effervescent and effortlessly obedient to my parents’ idea of what a daughter should be.

The arithmetic of our childhood was simple and never varied.

When I brought home a flawless report card, my mother would set it aside without comment and spend the evening praising Rosalie’s turn in the school ballet.

When I won the statewide debate championship, my father missed the final round because Rosalie needed him to drive her to a fitting for a pageant gown.

“Why can’t you be more like your sister, Josephine?” my mother would ask, adjusting my collar with a tug that was closer to a correction than a caress.