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proper job.
    “You don’t understand,” she’d say. “It isn’t about pensions and security anymore. No one wants that, Dad. And even if they did, companies aren’t offering it. Life isn’t the way it used to be.”
    “Well some things haven’t changed,” her dad would say. “I notice you still come to me every time you need money.”
    “Fine,” she would huff. “I didn’t realize it was a problem. I won’t come to you anymore.” And she wouldn’t. For a while.
    Her mother was more understanding. An artist herself, she had always encouraged Steffi to follow a creative path. When Steffi dropped out of Emory—she was far too busy partying and having fun to bother with work—her mother, while not quite actively encouraging it, said that she had never thought Steffi would thrive in an academic environment.
    Her father, on the other hand, had almost had heart failure. There were only two things Steffi could do that would make him happy: work at a bank or insurance company, with a steady salary and a medical plan, or find a wealthy husband to take care of her. Given that she had been fired from every desk job she had ever attempted, and given her penchant for actors, musicians and writers, it was looking increasingly unlikely she would be able to make her father happy.
    “When are you going to grow up?” he shouted a couple of times.
    “You will find out what you are here for,” her mother said, and gently smiled. “It just may take you a little longer to find out, but that’s okay. It took me a little longer too.”
    Steffi still cannot believe her mother and father had once been married. She doesn’t remember a time when they were ever together. She was barely a toddler when they split up, but spent her entire childhood dreaming of them remarrying, even though, for years, they quite clearly hated each other.
    Now of course, as an adult, she has asked her mother.
    “Tell me again why you married him?”
    “I was young, he was handsome. I thought it would make my mother happy.”
    “Did it?”
    “Of course. To marry a Tollemache? My mother was over the moon.” Honor’s eyes clouded over as she remembered.
    “And they didn’t care about what you wanted?”
    “Things were different in those days.” Her mother smiled. “You married for a variety of reasons, and true love was rarely one of them.”
    “So you didn’t love him?”
    “Oh I did,” Honor said carefully. “Your father is a good man. I absolutely loved him, but we were such different people. Truly, we should never have married each other.”
    Her father still refuses to talk about her mother, unless it’s a sarcastic dig. You would think, considering he has married twice more since then, not to mention having had a long-term live-in lover too, that he would have moved on, but he has never seemed able to let go of the anger. Callie has theorized that it is because their mother humiliated him by leaving him so unexpectedly.
    And yet, when Honor’s second husband, the man she described as the love of her life, died eight years ago, Walter wrote her a long letter, expressing his sorrow, and his regret that he hadn’t been able to find the sort of happiness she had had.
    Callie had been stunned at the generosity and genuine kindness contained within the letter. She suggested that their parents meet up again, try to become friends, but her father quickly reverted to the dismissiveness of old, and said he wanted nothing to do with their mother. It was bad enough he had to see her at weddings and christenings, he said. The last thing he wanted was her as a movie date.
    Callie remains convinced it is because Walter is still in love with her. Throughout their marriage—fourteen years—he had been happy, had thought he had the perfect life. Walter hadn’t realized that their mother was, much like Steffi, a free spirit, but one who was trying to be a good daughter, a good wife, a good mother. A woman who was trying so hard to be someone