“Oh you poor thing.” Liza found it hard to imagine. “How did you cope?”

“It was hard. I’d lost my lover and my best friend. Ruth was distraught. She was worried about telling her parents. Worried about how she would survive. Guilty at having hurt me. Adam came to see me and begged forgiveness. Until you read the letter, I didn’t know he’d told Ruth. He said it was a silly mistake.” There was a hint of irritation in Kathleen’s voice. “But that ‘silly mistake’, even if that’s what it was, couldn’t be easily undone. Ruth was pregnant. She needed support. Her parents wouldn’t give it. I could hardly give it. That left Adam. I told him he had to do the responsible thing. Then I packed up all my things and left. I didn’t believe their relationship would sustain, or even that Adam would be there for her, but I knew there was more chance of that happening if I wasn’t in the picture.”

Liza closed her eyes. As a child she’d seen her mother as being apart—almost detached—as she pursued her own life, with her family an adjunct to that life. To her great shame she’d often considered Kathleen to be bordering selfish in her decision making, and yet here was an example of the most selfless behavior Liza could have imagined. Would she have been as strong willed in the same circumstances? She didn’t know. All she knew was that she now had a very different view of her mother. “Did Dad know all this?”

“Yes. I avoided close relationships after that, as you might imagine. Both male and female. I was fortunate to fall into a job that I found exciting, and then came The Summer Seekers. I had a life that didn’t allow me time for more than the most superficial of friendships, and that also absolved me of all need to reflect on my life. Had your father not been the steady, persistent man he was, I doubt I would have married at all.”

“I’m glad you told me. I’m glad we’re reading these letters together.”

“I should have done it before, but I preferred to keep the past in the past. I’ve given you the impression that it was easy, and it wasn’t. It really was the most terrible mess. Of course in those days we didn’t have mobile phones or email, so communication wasn’t as instant and continuous as it is now. That made it easier. Martha has Steven’s name popping up on her phone all the time. I didn’t have to handle that. No wonder the poor girl needed to escape.”

Martha had been escaping from a bad relationship?