“Then, by chance, he spent a weekend in a place far away from London with an old college friend. Now, this woman was not someone who was strong, or independent. She’d had a rough life, in fact, had been badly treated by her husband, and recently left by another boyfriend, and needed to be cheered up a little bit. She’d also been sick, and needed to be tended to somewhat, physically. She needed … it seemed … him.”

“But he’s ours,” said Lulu.

“Oh, yes.” Fee nodded vigorously. “Well, he’s not ours, in the sense that people don’t belong to other people, although he’ll always be your father, Lu, and he’ll always love you as one, no matter what happens. And I’m quite sure that if Jane Caldwell were to sit down with her own friends or her therapist or whoever, she could describe what happened from her side in a way that would make sense, too. But I’m not interested in her side of what happened, Lulu. I’m interested in what goes on in this family. And that includes trying to help you to see a little of what your father was going through to make him act the way he did.”

“I’m not sure that I do see, though,” said Lulu. “If Dad felt like that about things, shouldn’t he have come to talk to you and try to put it right?”

“I’d obviously have preferred that,” said Fee. “But he’s a man, after all, and men aren’t so good at talking about these things, and English men are even less good than most. This was a lack in me as much as in him—I’m a therapist, I should have tried to open up better communication.”

Lulu looked down at the grain of the wood on the friendly worn table.

“Is Claire just a joke-type joke?” she asked then. “Or is she the sort of joke that means he’d really secretly like us all to be sort of more like that?”

Fee smiled. “She’s just a joke, sweetie,” she said. “Part of your father’s dry British sense of humor, which was one of the parts of him I fell in love with all those years ago. I can’t say she’s an especially funny joke right now, but she’s a joke all right…. Make no mistake, Lulu, your father has messed up big-time, and I am more angry with him and hurt by him than I have ever been in all our marriage. But marriage isn’t perfect, any more than the rest of life is. I’m sure that you’ll be married, too, one day, and when you are, you’ll find out that it isn’t a tidy little picture of one person meets another and they live happily ever after. It’s two imperfect human beings coming together and scrambling and struggling and rough-and-tumbling their way through a lot of obstacles—whether it’s crossing an ocean in my case, or being the boss’s daughter in Charlie’s. It’s years of commitment and loving and making decisions and making jokes and cooking supper and saying the right thing and saying the wrong thing and making mistakes and forgiving each other for mistakes until over the years you find that, together, you’ve formed a great, big, wildly colored tapestry of a whole shared life. And, in your father’s case, the last couple of weeks or so are an unfortunate part of the tapestry that he and I have created, and one that I certainly wish weren’t there, but it’s by no means the whole piece, and it’s by no means big enough to ruin it completely.”