“I couldn’t function, couldn’t do anything. I wasn’t there for such a long time. I know I let Jack and Sean down, but I couldn’t…” She coughs and her face spasms in pain.

“Julia,” I say, squeezing her hand, wishing I’d never asked. “Don’t—rest…”

“I have to,” she says again. “I’m sorry, Sean. I’m so sorry.”

“You left,” he said, his own voice raw. “You came out of that…fog and you left. You were only a couple of miles down the road, but it might as well have been a thousand. You stopped calling, put us off when we wanted to visit.”

“Your father—”

“Don’t blame Dad.”

“He blamed me.”

Sean reacts to that, getting up and turning away from us to face the curtained window.

“Greg got angry—at first he raged at the world for taking his little girl away, but then he turned that rage on me.”

“I never saw anything,” Sean says.

“He never did anything in front of you, but when we were alone, he said things—awful things. He made my guilt grow. He hated me; he told me I killed her. He said I murdered her.”

Sean turns. “Stop it.”

“He started drinking more. One night he pushed me against the wall and put his hands around my throat. There was so much rage on his face.” She looks back at me. “I was already close to your dad by then but nothing had happened—it was too soon after he lost your mother, way too soon after I’d lost Ellie, but we…we helped each other. We became friends.” She turns her head toward Sean. “I couldn’t stay. We weren’t a couple anymore. I couldn’t stay and wait for him to start using his fists.”

“But you left us behind,” Sean says. “Packed us back off to school and left without telling us. You could have told us; you could have had us to visit every other damned weekend. Christ, you weren’t the first parents to split up, but it was like you wanted to leave us as well as Dad.”

“I never planned to leave you. Greg made you go back to school so soon after Ellie died, made Jack go off to work when he left school. I couldn’t stay, I couldn’t. But I tried—I called you. I called you both and you wouldn’t take my calls.”

“We were angry,” Sean bursts out. “You ran off without a word, moved in with another man, for God’s sake. But we would have listened, eventually. If you’d kept trying.”

Julia rubs her eyes. “I know. I left it too long. And when I made you visit…it was too late. You hated me then.”

“I never…” He stops.