“This isn’t easy to say,” her father told her.

“It’s all right,” Caddie assured him. “I’m not going to be mad. I just want to know.”

Her father looked at her. “Your mother had an affair with Ronnie,” he said. “That’s why I left.”

Caddie was stunned. She’d been prepared for her father to admit his gayness, had already forgiven him for not being able to accept it. Now she didn’t know what to think. Her mother? She found it difficult to imagine, let alone accept.

“I don’t really know how long it had been going on,” her father said, oblivious to the storm beginning to rage inside her. “I found out by accident. When your mother admitted it, I didn’t exactly ask for details.”

“Maybe it was just a one-time thing,” Caddie blurted out.

Her father shook his head. “It had been going on for a long time,” he said. “I know that much.”

“So it wasn’t you,” Caddie said.

“It was both of us, Caddie,” her father told her. “Your mother wouldn’t have had an affair if I had been paying attention.”

“But it wasn’t you,” Caddie insisted. “You weren’t the one in love with someone else.” She was trying to make him understand what she was saying, which was that she’d been blaming him for something he hadn’t done.

“You mean with Ronnie?” he said. “No. Although maybe I was in love with him too. Maybe that’s why I just left instead of trying to work things out. I don’t know. I just knew I couldn’t be there.”

“She never told me,” Caddie said. “She let me think that it was all your fault.”

“Please don’t be angry at your mother,” her father said.

Caddie’s head snapped up. “Why not?” she asked. “She should have told me.” Her voice was loud, angry, and she felt herself shaking. “You should have told me.”

“Would it really have made a difference?”

Of course it would have, she thought. But even as she began to say so, she saw that it wasn’t entirely true. Even had she known, her father would still be who he was. She still—probably—wouldn’t have had him in her life for all of those years. But maybe I would have tried harder, she thought.

“What happened to him?” she asked.

“I think your mother broke it off not long after I left,” her father answered. “I suppose she thought it might fix everything.”

His voice trailed off, and his face got a dreamy look about it, as if he was thinking about what might have been. Caddie, too, was thinking about what her life might have been like had this man, her mother’s lover, not come along and ruined things.