“I'm okay.” But she sounded anything but convincing while she cried harder.

“No, you're not okay, you liar.” And then, the ultimate threat. “If you don't come, I'll call the tabloids,” Mary Stuart said firmly, and Tanya laughed.

“You're disgusting,” Tanya said, laughing through her tears. “I don't see you for a year, and what do I do, I end up getting divorced in the two days I do finally see you.”

“At least I can be here for you. Now come on over, before I call the Enquirer and the Globe and the Star, and any others I can find. Do you want me to come and get you, Tan?” she asked gently, but Tanya blew her nose again at the other end.

“No, I'm okay. All right… I'll come over. I'll be there in five minutes.” And she was, with uncombed hair, and red eyes and a red nose. But in spite of it all, she still looked gorgeous, as Mary Stuart told her, as she put her arms around her and held her like a child crying in her arms. She had had a lot of practice with Todd and Alyssa, and she was a good mother. She had done a lot of comforting and consoling in twenty-two years. But sadly, not enough for Todd. If she had, things might have been different.

“I can't believe this… it's all fallen apart in about five minutes,” Tanya said about her marriage. Except they both knew that it had actually taken a lot longer. Tony had been steaming for a long time, about all the things that irked him in her life, he just hadn't said so. And she realized now that he had been unhappy for a lot longer than she thought. Looking back, she could see all the signals, but she had missed them as they happened.

Mary Stuart made her a cup of tea, despite the heat outside, and Tanya sat down in the immaculate white kitchen and drank it.

“What do you do in this place anyway?” Tanya asked, as she looked around her. “Order out?”

“No, I cook here,” Mary Stuart said primly, but with a smile at her friend. Tanya looked battered and bruised, but a little bit better for the comfort. “I just like things clean and organized.”

“No,” Tanya corrected her. “You like things perfect, and you know it. But it can't always be perfect, sometimes everything is a mess and that's just the way it is, and you can't change that. Maybe you need to accept that. I keep getting the feeling that you're beating yourself up for what happened.” It was true, and Tanya wanted more than anything to release her friend from the torment she could still see in her eyes.

“Wouldn't you beat yourself up?” Mary Stuart asked softly. “How could I not blame myself? Bill blames me… I know it… he can't even look at me anymore. We live here like strangers. We're not even enemies anymore… at first we were, there's not even that now.”

“Is he coming tonight?” Tanya asked her, feeling sad for both of them. The hands life had dealt them had not been easy. At least not lately.

But Mary Stuart shook her head in answer. “He said he has to work late at the office.”

“He's hiding.” Like most people, she was wise about everyone's life but her own, but Tanya was also smarter than most people. She just picked lousy husbands.

“I know he is,” Mary Stuart said as they wandered to her bedroom. “But I can't find him. I've looked everywhere, and I don't know where he is anymore. It's like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. There's a man living here, and he looks like Bill, but I know he isn't. But I have no idea where they've put the real one.”

“Keep looking,” Tanya said, and surprised Mary Stuart with her earnestness. “It's not over till it's over.” Somehow Tanya felt they had something worth saving. They'd been married for nearly twenty-two years. That was a long time to walk out on. On the other hand, people did it, and if Mary Stuart never found him again, it was wrong of her to waste her life with him forever, and Tanya knew that. She just hated to see her give up so soon, after everything that had happened to them. And it was so unfair that he should blame Mary Stuart.

“Is that true for you too?” Mary Stuart asked her, as they walked back down the hall toward the living room, past a bunch of closed doors that Tanya suspected were other bedrooms. “It's not over till it's over?”

“I think in my case, it's different,” Tanya said with a sigh. “Maybe it never was, or never should have been. But I think it's been over for a while, and I didn't want to see it. I never realized how unhappy he was with all the garbage I can't control. But if that's going to make him crazy, then I can't do anything about it.” She still loved him, but she was also smart enough to know when she was defeated. And in some ways, it had never been completely right between them since the beginning and she knew that too, although she would have hated to admit it.

They settled in the living room and talked for a while, and then Tanya got up and said she had to go to the powder room, and Mary Stuart told her where to go. There was a tiny guest bathroom down the hall, on the left, and Tanya walked swiftly toward it. She opened the door, turned on the light, and then gasped. She had opened the wrong door, and she was standing in Todd's bedroom, staring at the trophies and the pictures and the memorabilia all around her. Everything in the room was perfectly in place, and it was as if he was in school, and would be home from Princeton any minute. And as she stood looking at all of it, Tanya didn't hear Mary Stuart come up behind her, or see the look of devastation in her eyes as she looked around her.

“I never come in here anymore,” she said in a whisper that made Tanya jump, and she turned to see the ravaged look in her friend's eyes and instinctively put her arms around her. Tanya didn't think she should have left the room that way. It was like a shrine to him, and just knowing it was there, so close to her every day, had to be incredibly painful. There was a wonderful photograph of him on the desk, with two friends from school. Tanya had forgotten how exactly he looked like his mother when he smiled, but now she remembered, and it made her cry to see it.

“Oh, Mary Stuart,” she said as tears filled her eyes too, “I'm so sorry… I opened the wrong door, and I just kind of fell in here…”

The boy's mother smiled through her tears and pulled away, standing next to Tanya and staring at the same picture. “He was so wonderful, Tanny… he was such a terrific kid… he always did the right thing… he was always the star, the boy everyone wanted to be, the kid everyone fell in love with…” There were tears slowly rolling down her cheeks and Tanya stood staring at the picture, it was as though she expected him to speak, or appear in the room, but they both knew he wouldn't.

“I know. I remember him perfectly… he looked so much like you,” Tanya said in a soft voice.

“I still can't believe it happened,” Mary Stuart said, looking at Tanny, and then sitting on the bed. She hadn't done that since Christmas. She had come in here alone, late on Christmas Eve, and lay on his bed, clutching his pillow, and cried for hours. As usual, she hadn't dared tell Bill she'd been in there. He had told her once before that he thought the room should be kept locked, but when she asked him what he thought she should do with Todd's things, he had told her to do whatever she wanted. And she hadn't had the heart to take any of it apart. She just couldn't bring herself to do it.

“Shouldn't you put his things away?” Tanya asked her sadly. She could only imagine how difficult it would be, but she wondered if it would be healthier for them. Or maybe they should think about selling the apartment. But she didn't dare say that.

“I just couldn't,” Mary Stuart answered her. “I just can't put his things away,” she said, and tears roiled down her cheeks all over again, thinking of the child who had once lived there. “I miss him so terribly… we all do. Bill doesn't say anything, but I know he must too. It's killing him… it's killing all of us…” She knew how it hurt Alyssa too. She had seen her go into his room once. And she didn't think it was a complete mystery why she wanted to stay in Paris. Who could blame her for that? Coming home was pretty depressing, and for the moment, there was no relief in sight. Neither she nor Bill seemed to have recovered.

“It wasn't your fault,” Tanya suddenly said firmly, taking her friend by both arms, and looking into her eyes with a sense of purpose. It was as though she was meant to be here. “You have to believe that. You couldn't have stopped him once he made his mind up.”

“How could I not see what was happening to him? How could I love him so much and miss it completely?” Mary Stuart knew she would never forgive herself for what she hadn't seen and what had happened.

“He didn't want you to see it. He was a grown man, he had a right to keep his own secrets. He didn't want you to know, or he would have told you. You're not expected to know everything, to see into someone's mind. You couldn't have known, Mary Stuart, you have to believe that.” What Tanya couldn't believe was that Bill had tortured her for the past year and hadn't released her from her own guilt. Instead, he had confirmed it to her, both by his actions and by his silence.

“I'll always think it was my fault,” Mary Stuart said sadly, but Tanya would not let her go. She was determined to free her from the hooks that held her. It was the ultimate act of friendship, and a matter of Mary Stuart's survival.

“You're not that important,” she said quietly. “As much as he loved you, you weren't that important to him. He had his own life, his own friends, his own dreams, his own disappointments, his own tragedies. You couldn't have made him do it if you wanted to, and you couldn't have made him not do it, no matter how much you wanted to. Not unless he had come to you, and begged you to stop him. And he would never have done that, he was too private a person, just like you are.” Tanya was very serious as she looked her in the eye, determined to help her friend now.

“But I would never do anything like that,” Mary Stuart said, still staring at her son's picture, as though she could still ask him why it had happened. But they all knew why now. It was so pathetically simple. The girl he had loved for four years had died in a car accident, on an icy New Jersey road four months before, and he had quietly sunk into an ever deeper depression. No one had realized how depressed he was, or the full extent of his despair after she died. They had thought he was coming out of it at Easter. But in retrospect, Mary Stuart had realized that he only seemed happier at Easter because he had probably decided to do it when he went back after the vacation. He had been so close to his mother then. They had gone for a long walk in the park, and talked philosophically and laughed, he had even talked in vague terms about his future. He told her he knew now he would always be happy. And then he did it, the night he went back. He committed suicide two weeks before his twentieth birthday, in his room in Princeton. The boy in the next room had found him. He had come in to borrow something and he had found Todd in bed, asleep, and something about the way he lay there aroused suspicion. He had checked him immediately and administered CPR, until the police and the fire department came. But they said later that Todd had been dead for several hours when the boy found him. He had left a note to each of them, telling them that he felt so peaceful and so calm, and so happy at last. He said it was cowardly of him, he knew, and he regretted any pain he would cause them, but he simply couldn't live without Natalie anymore. He said he had truly tried. And he hoped that once they forgave him, they would be relieved to know that he and Natalie would be together forever in Heaven. Although his parents had said they were too young, he had wanted to marry her, after graduation, the following summer. And in a sense, Todd said in his note, they were married now. And through it all, once they heard the news, and long afterward, Bill had blamed Mary Stuart. He said that she had filled his head with foolishness and romantic notions, she had allowed him to become too seriously involved with Natalie for the past four years, and if she hadn't forced religion on him, he would never have had such absurd notions of the hereafter or of God. According to Bill, Mary Stuart had, in fact, set the stage for disaster. And he laid Todd's suicide entirely on the conscience of his mother. At the time, what he said to her had almost killed her. But more than anything he could have said to her was the agony of her loss of her older child, her only son… her firstborn… the child who had always been her sunshine, and brought her so much joy and pride.

And as Tanya listened to her, she wanted to go to Bill Walker and shake him. His accusations were the most insane she had ever heard, and she sensed easily that he was trying to ease his own pain, and feelings of failure, by blaming it all on Mary Stuart. It was so cruel, it was almost beyond bearing. And it was easy to see what had happened to Mary Stuart as a result. She was nearly dead inside.