“She couldn’t have done that.”

Anna held my gaze.

“Couldn’t she?”

I had no answer.

Everyone in Millfield listened to Ruth.

“My mother,” I whispered. “My mother taught Sunday school.”

“Your mother had power,” Anna said softly. “And she used it on a twenty-year-old girl whose family had nothing.”

“So the letter you sent me—the one saying you couldn’t handle the distance…”

“I wrote it that night. I cried the whole way through it.”

I stared down at the coffee between my hands.

“What happened afterward? Did you marry?”

Anna shook her head.

“No.”

“Children?”

“No. There was never anyone else I could imagine that life with.”

Forty years suddenly felt much longer.

For all that time, I’d believed Anna simply hadn’t loved me enough.

“Why didn’t you come to me? Even after you left?”

Anna lowered her eyes to her hands.

“I found out I was pregnant three weeks later.”