“Tina, I wouldn’t do anything stupid. I just couldn’t take another night of you not wanting to talk to me. It just got too hard, listening to your voice asking me to leave a message just made it hurt even more than before.”

“I didn’t do it to hurt you. I just wasn’t ready to talk to you. I needed some time on my own. You must understand that?”

“But you want to talk now?” asked Bette, tentatively, hopeful that she may get the chance that she had hoped since waking that morning to find Tina gone from their home.

“I need to know why Bette. What happened to us that you needed betray everything that I believed in?” Tina could feel the anger rising in herself but she knew that she had to hear what Bette had to say if she ever going to put her life back together.

Bette took a deep breath in that was audible to Tina on the other end of the line. She knew that what she was about to say could shape the rest of her life.

“Tina. I know that there is nothing that I could ever say that will change what I did and the damage that it did to you, to us. After you lost the baby it was like the bottom had fallen out of my world and I fell apart inside. I was lost because whenever anything awful had happened to me before you always picked me up, dusted me off, pushed me back out into the world as the Bette Porter that everyone expected me to be. You must know by now that you were the only person who ever saw my weaknesses, my vulnerability. To the outside world I was always the strong one but we both knew that really it was you that held us both together and when it was my turn to be strong for you I failed and I hated myself for it. It was like that hate held me captive from you, from everything good in my life and then Candace came along. She just seemed to be there, all of the time, taunting me, pulling me away from you and because I was weak I let her and then it was too late.”