“Hello,” she said, a little out of breath.

“Hey, Tully, happy birthday.”

“Hey, Mrs. M. I knew you’d call. I could come down and see you and Mr. M. right now. We could—”

“You have to make things right with Katie.”

She sat down on the end of her bed. “I was only trying to help.”

“But you didn’t help. Surely you see that?”

“Did you hear the things she said to me on TV? I was trying to help her and she told all of America . . .” She couldn’t even say it. That was how much it still hurt. “She owes me an apology.”

There was a long pause on the other end, then a tired sigh. “Oh, Tully.”

She heard the disappointment in Mrs. M.’s voice, and she felt like a kid again in the police station. No words came to her, for once.

“I love you like a daughter,” Mrs. M. finally said. “You know that, but . . .”

Like a daughter. There was a whole sea in that single word, an ocean of distance.

“You have to see how you hurt her.”

“What about how she hurt me?”

“What your mother did to you is a crime, Tully.” Mrs. M. made a sad sound, then said, “Bud is calling me. I better go. I’m sorry for the way things are, but I need to go now.”

Tully didn’t even say goodbye. She just quietly hung up the phone. The truth she’d been trying to outrun landed on her chest, so heavy she could hardly breathe.

Everyone she loved was a member of Kate’s family, not her own, and when the chips were down, they took sides.

And where was she left, then?

As the old song said, alone again. Naturally.

She got up slowly, and returned to her party, surprised that she’d been so blind. If there was one central lesson of her life, it was this: people leave. Parents. Lovers.

Friends.

In the room full of acquaintances and colleagues, she smiled brightly, made small talk, and went straight to the bar.

It wasn’t so hard to act normal, to pretend she was happy. It was what she’d done for so much of her life. Acted.

Only with Katie had she ever really been herself.

By the following autumn, Kate had stopped waiting for Tully to call. In the long months of their estrangement, she’d settled—albeit uncomfortably—into a rarefied and contained world, a kind of snow globe of her own creation. At first, of course, she’d cried about their lost friendship, ached for what had been, but in time, she accepted that there would be no apology from Tully, that if one were to be offered it would have to—as always—come from her.

The story of their lives.

Kate’s ego, usually such a fluid and convenient thing, became solid on this point. For once, she would not yield.