“We were a cliché, really. Our romance onstage spilled offstage. But Ruth and I were inseparable. I wasn’t going to be one of those people who ditched their friends when they fell in love, so invariably we ended up doing things together, the three of us. Ruth had gone to buy a picnic the day Adam proposed to me on the riverbank. Our exams had ended that day. I’d had a glass or two of champagne and was feeling excessively cheerful and optimistic about life. He produced a ring.”

Liza heard the wistful note in her voice. “The one in the drawer.”

“Yes. I believe it’s valuable, although I don’t know for sure. You’re probably wondering why I still have it.” Kathleen paused, as if she wasn’t sure of the answer herself. “He refused to take it back, and I couldn’t bring myself to sell it. I don’t quite know why. Maybe I thought it might act as a caution.”

At some point Liza would urge her to store it in a safer place, but that wasn’t the priority. Right now her thoughts were only for her mother. “You accepted his proposal. So where did Ruth come into the story? How did that happen?”

Her mother didn’t immediately answer. “I was naive. I believed Ruth to be impervious to his charms. She was the one person he didn’t seem able to impress. And Adam, being Adam, would have felt compelled to convert her into an admirer. I’m sure he would have done the hard work, because Ruth would never have proactively gone after him. Not that I’m absolving her of blame. But I see how it might have happened. Adam was godlike, and she would have been flattered. But it turned out her feelings ran far deeper for him than I’d thought.”

Liza’s chest ached as she thought about how her mother must have felt. Her fiancé and her best friend. The betrayal had upended her life in every possible way.

“Had it been going on for a long time?”

“No. It was after the Summer Ball. I was due to go with Adam. Ruth hadn’t planned to go at all. She didn’t enjoy that kind of thing, but then I ate something that disagreed with me—it won’t surprise you to know that I lacked caution in my eating even back then—and went down with a vicious bout of food poisoning. So Adam took Ruth instead.” There was a pause, and the sound of her mother taking a breath. “And that was it. They didn’t tell me right away, although I suspected something because they both behaved differently around me. And then a few weeks later Ruth discovered she was pregnant. And in those days being a single mother was greeted with horror and judgment of course.”