They both sipped the coffee, not commenting further on the coffee, then simultaneously put their cups down, and sat back.

“As I was saying,” Tina started, “About two weeks after you’d, um, left, I went to see Dan.  There were  (she paused, searching for an appropriate term)… circumstances that prompted it.  Not the least being concerns of various people who love us… the both of us…and who were getting anxious about, um…things.  Mostly about me, and how, as Kit was saying, I looked like I was going over the deep end.”

“Well…you had left.  I thought I would die.  You were my first… and my only…," she paused.

"Each time I told her how worried I was about you, though, she strangely seemed to have this… confidence about how you were doing…so was asking me all the time about how I was doing, instead.  She was always assuring me, ‘She is crazy in love with you, Tina.  Bette will be coming back.  To you.’"

Bette pursed her lips in a half-smile, half-frown.  She sympathized with Tina’s despair at that time.  She had struggled also, but Kit had seen right through her, in her own conversations with her sister.

Tina continued, “Later on, she told me, and all the girls, too, that you’d gotten in touch with her soon after you’d left, but you’d asked her not to disclose this as yet.”

She smiled at Bette, “She was a good sister to you Bette…and at the same time, a very good friend to me.”

Bette smiled back, “I’m sure she was.  I have to find a way to thank her appropriately… both for respecting what I’d asked her, despite the fact that I’m sure it was really difficult to do, under the circumstances, especially when she was checking in with you…”

They both fell quiet, each recalling the difficulties they had individually faced, as they struggled with being apart.

Then Tina continued, “I’m sure you were probably, to use Kit’s words “going off the deep end,” too, while deeply hurt,” hazel eyes searched brown ones, which had been downcast, but then turned up to gaze at Tina.  Bette nodded, a few tears falling on her robe.  She wiped them away.

Tina recounted,“On my end, a little over a week after this all started, our well-meaning friends had gotten together, and staged an intervention. “