“I loved Bobby. He was one of the most talented people I've ever met. He was charming and funny.” Lu smiled and shrugged. “And when I worked with him, I won two Tonys.”

“He ran around on your daughter!” Carrie said indignantly. Her mother would have been so humiliated by that. Protective feelings Carrie hadn't known she had rose up.

Lu's smile faded. “I never said he was the man I would have picked for a son-in-law. No woman in her right mind would want Bobby Manning to marry her daughter—especially if that daughter was Rose. But that didn't change how I felt about him as a person. Do you understand?”

Carrie sighed and nodded, her indignation melting away. She could understand her grandmother. Lu Lawson was a realist who accepted people as they were. Rose Lawson Manning had never learned to do that.

“Did Mother know Bobby was cheating?”

“I don't know. Rose was so proud, she never would have admitted it. Especially not to me.”

“Why not? You were her mother.”

“I had tried to warn her about Bobby before she married him. My relationship with Rose had always been … rocky. But after that… I was the last person she'd tell if she was having a problem. You know?”

Carrie nodded again. She knew what could happen when you said something her mother hadn't wanted to hear.

“Rose knew what Bobby was like before they got married; he told her himself. But she wanted to believe her love could make him into a different person.” Suddenly there were tears in Lu's eyes. “She had everything going for her. She was beautiful and bright—she could have done anything. But all she wanted was a man who couldn't give her what she needed. I'd hear the gossip about him at the theater and I'd pray she didn't know. And then I'd pray that he would change, even though I knew people don't.” Lu blinked back the tears.

“It sounds like things were pretty bad for them,” Carrie said. And then she had to ask. “Did I make it worse? When I came along? George Standish said Bobby wasn't the white-picket-fence-and-pet-dog kind of guy. He couldn't have been happy about having a baby.”