“You think she enabled your mother?”

“I suppose we all did that, including my father. But in the end the responsibility was our mother’s. We tried to persuade her to get help, but she wouldn’t. I’m fine, she’d say. Perfectly fine.” Thinking back to that time made her restless, and Robyn stood up and walked to the window. There was something clean and pure about the landscape that always calmed her. Later she’d go out with her camera. She’d capture the fresh fall of snow, and the subtle changes to the world around her.

“That must have been hard for everyone, but particularly for you. You were still a child.”

“Without Elizabeth there, I had to deal with the full force of our mother’s moods. The only predictable element was that it was unpredictable. Everything was a drama. Our mother went from calm to screaming with no warning, and when she was angry she broke things. It was frightening and confusing, and somehow it felt as if everything was my fault. I was going through a teenage phase, so I screamed back at her. The house was a war zone. And that was when Dad walked out.” She heard the scrape of the chair on the floor and felt the touch of Christy’s hand on her arm.

“I didn’t know any of this.”

“My mother blamed me for Dad leaving. She pointed out that he hadn’t left in all the years before, so it couldn’t possibly be her that was the cause. It had to be me.”

“And you believed her,” Christy murmured, “despite the fact she was so obviously wrong. That was cruel. A terrible thing to say to a child.”

Robyn stared out the window. “I had such low self-esteem, I couldn’t see a different answer. One day instead of pouring away our mother’s secret supply of alcohol as we’d always done, I drank it. And then I did it again and again.”

“Oh Robyn—”

“And then Elizabeth came home for a visit. She saw it right away, of course. She’d spent eighteen years living with an alcoholic so there was no missing it. She was appalled. It made no sense to her, but of course none of it ever did make sense. She tried to help me, but I wasn’t ready to be helped. She could have been mad with me, but instead she seemed...disappointed. Which was much worse. I felt as if I’d let her down. I couldn’t handle what I was feeling, so I drank more.” She’d thought she’d come to terms with it long before. She’d thought she’d processed all those emotions and found an element of peace, but reliving it now brought with it a wash of shame. “Elizabeth could have gone back to college and forgotten about me. She could have focused on her own life, but she didn’t do that. She came home more often. She tried to persuade me to get help. I suppose being away from home and mixing more freely with other people had given her some clarity. She’d begun to live a normal life, but she was running the risk of being sucked back into the old one. She tried to persuade our mother to get help, too. She kept talking about addiction, but I didn’t feel like an addict. I was someone who was doing what needed to be done to get through the day. I thought I was having a good time and she was a killjoy. I was partying nonstop. I flunked all my exams. Anything I was supposed to not do, I did it. Drugs, men. I was a mess.”