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was part of something bigger and greater than what it actually was. 
    She had no intention of servicing other people for the rest of her life.  She wanted to move out west, live in a pretty little town somewhere and understand what it meant to be free in an expanse of endless open land.  The Big Apple was for big dreamers and her dreams were simple.
    She had graduated Magna Cum Laude from City College two years before and was almost finished with her master’s degree in teaching.  As soon as her last grade was posted, she planned to apply for teaching positions in high schools throughout America’s west.  She had bid her time, had slowly and meticulously planned the rest of her life, often in secret.
    The only thing that gave her pause about this plan was her father.  He loved her more than the Upper West Side apartment where he worked, which was saying a lot.   She was proof of something to him---proof that he was a capable man who could raise a daughter single handedly and raise her well.  The fact that she even existed made him proud and he fawned over her the same way he fawned over the people he served in the apartments.
    “Alex!” he had said through the years when she’d described her vagabond dreams to him. “There are trees in Central Park.  There are trees and squirrels and rocks and ponds.  Why would you need to go anywhere else?”
    Her dreams were an aberration to him, something he couldn’t even begin to understand and he wondered what wayward gene had been bestowed upon his daughter that caused her to dream of fleeing New York.
    “My God Alex!” he’d say.  “Everything everyone could possibly want exists right here in your own backyard!  What else is there?”
    His daughter was book smart, but her brain had somehow talked her into ignoring the fact that she was beautiful.  She was nearly six-feet tall, with blonde, flowing hair that reached her shoulders in gentle curls.  She had wide green eyes and a sculptured, classic face and even with her glasses on, she was every bit as beautiful as the models who lived in the infamous apartment building where he worked every day.
    The irony was that she didn’t know it.
    She glided down the streets of New York like a wandering cloud, as if she wasn’t sure where she was going, always oblivious to the glances of men and the envious stares of women.  Her clothes were plain and her eyes were always cast downward, but still her beauty shone through the cloud that seemed to follow her.
    He didn’t think she’d ever leave him.  He didn’t think she had the strength to go off on her own.
     

-Chapter 2-
     
    When the fall had come and gone and Alex still hadn’t heard from any of the schools she’d applied to, she decided she would have to come up with Plan B.
    Alex wasn’t used to having a Plan B.  Her plan A’s had always come to fruition.  She never found it difficult to set a goal and forge her way there---sometimes rather effortlessly.
    She still kept in touch with her mother although she didn’t visit as regularly as she once did. She lived in San Francisco, having headed west she’d met another man and moved west.  The details of the story remained frozen in time at the behest of her father, but she knew her mother had fallen in love with someone else who turned out to be a very wealthy man.
    Her parents had married when they were young and “before we knew who we really were,” her mother had told her.  She had wanted Alex to join her in California once she got settled with her new husband but her father would not hear of it.  As the years went on, Alex was glad that she’d stayed in New York.  Her mother was now mothering a stepchild part time and it was confusing for her to see her mother nurturing another child when she’d missed out on so much of it.
    They lived a different life than Alex and her father did.  They were part of the cocktail set and they owned a boat and a private company plane and there was a private