A/N Hello again! Right, thought I would get this one out there. It's a shorter chapter and there's no Eric, but it has a lot of the backstory I know you've been waiting for.

SPOV

My three days away from working had energised me a bit. I'd caught up on my washing and my vacuuming (boring, but necessary), I'd played endless rounds of witches and fairy princesses with Amelia (just once I wanted to be the fairy princess) and I'd spent time sitting on the floor with Felicia trying to entice her to crawl. She wasn't showing any inclination to do so yet. Still, if she didn't occasionally display a stubborn streak, I would have been worried that she was so laid-back she'd end up like my older brother Jason. He was drifting through life and was currently share-milking somewhere in Taranaki, after having failed spectacularly at a number of other occupations. I hoped he wasn't the only one in charge of the cows, or they were doomed.

I hadn't heard from him since the funeral in March, he was pretty useless at keeping in contact, but then I wasn't a lot better. I was never sure if it was because we only had each other or in spite of it that we were so keen to keep our distance from one another. Our parents had drowned during a storm when their boat capsized when I was 20. I'd lived with our Gran until Bill and I had gone to the UK, but she'd died a few years later while I was on honeymoon. That had been rough.

Still, I had the Comptons I guess. Part of the attraction with Bill had been the big family, at least at first. Once you got to know them it was a bit of a different story of course.

That Saturday we had dinner with Judith, Calvin and Jessica at their house. The weather was just warm enough for us to have a barbeque and sit outside to eat. Lorena was invited too and she eyed her steak on its plastic plate distastefully and made a rather sour face. Judith noticed and just rolled her eyes. Calvin thankfully was oblivious, as he currently had Amelia and Jessica attached to his legs and was stomping around the garden pretending to be a giant. Felicia watched from her Bumbo seat and practiced clapping.

So I had been able to catch up on all the Compton family gossip at least. From Lorena I learned that Portia was stifling her poor son Glen and he was going to grow up to be a 'mummy's boy' if she didn't cut the apron strings soon, that Sarah needed to tell Matt it was his job to be the bread-winner in the family and threaten to throw him out if he didn't buck his ideas up, and that Caroline was 'almost definitely' coming back for Christmas this year and bringing her new boyfriend.

Later on, while we were doing the dishes I learned from Judith that Portia had been on the phone complaining that Lorena let Glen watch Harry Potter and now he had nightmares, that Lorena had tried to guilt Judith and Calvin into lending Sarah money, because the 'poor thing' was in a terrible state and needed our help (yeah, we'd all been there with Sarah), and that Caroline was definitely not coming back for Christmas because the boyfriend was shouting them a trip to Thailand, but no one wanted to tell Lorena if Caroline wasn't going to say it herself.

So basically, there was nothing new there.

No one mentioned Bill, but that wasn't new either. Even before the accident no one had much, because there wasn't a lot to say. He patently didn't want our help, and no one knew where he was half the time. I never thought I'd end up with a drug-addict for a husband.

I'd met Bill in my first year at university studying for a Bachelor of Commerce. I'd turned up for the first accounting tutorial to find it full of boys from good schools who took one look at me and decided I was so dumb it wasn't even worth listening to me. Except for Bill. He was a couple of years older than me, as he'd worked in an office for some time after leaving school in order to save up enough money for uni; Lorena certainly wasn't footing the bill.

He just seemed so mature and well, nice. I guess all those years of being the head of the household had made him grow up fast. No one had seen his dad since 1985. All Bill remembers is there was some sort of affair and Lorena threw him out in a fit of rage. For all I knew she'd buried him in the back garden.

But Bill certainly charmed me from the get-go. We did all the usual things you did at that age; went to movies, hung out with friends, went to parties. I'd never really had a boyfriend before, the kids at my school in South Auckland considered me stuck up and I struggled to find schoolboys interesting anyway. I loved having Bill as my boyfriend.

And then we graduated, got jobs. I worked in a bank branch; he worked on a computer helpline. We saved our money, went to the UK, travelled and earned pounds. We came back, got married, bought a nice house, and had a baby. So far, so much what I expected.

But then Bill changed. At first I thought it was just stress. He'd come home late, he'd stay up all night in his study 'working' on stuff. He wouldn't answer his cell phone to me, but he'd take calls from other people in the middle of the night. He'd say they were work ones. He'd go out for 'drives' in the weekend to 'clear his head'. He'd be gone for hours and I wouldn't be able to reach him.

I thought he was having an affair. I tore his study apart looking for evidence but what I found was worse. Drugs. Bill was using P. Despite all the stories in the paper about how this was the scourge of the nation and it could affect anyone and any family, I really hadn't thought that my nice, middle-class husband with the pleasant personality and the good job would fall prey to it. Guess he wasn't as grown-up as I thought he was.

I confronted him, he confessed. I tried to convince him to get treatment. He said he could work through it on his own. When his behaviour hadn't changed after a week, and I was pretty sure he was still using, I gave him an ultimatum. Stop using or move out. I was pregnant with Felicia and couldn't face the stress anymore.

He picked the drugs over his family and moved into a grotty flat in Onehunga. He'd turn up every so often to see Amelia, but he was hard to track down. I'd found out when he moved out that he'd lost his job and was surviving on doing the odd bit of contracting, when he was in a state to turn up to work.

Lorena of course pretended it wasn't happening and acted as though I'd driven my husband away by making unreasonable demands. He always was her golden boy.

By Christmas he was looking pale and tired and desperately in need of sleep. He turned up at 7pm on Christmas day and couldn't understand why Amelia was over the whole day and long past opening any presents. He made it to Felicia's birth, but had to be removed from the birthing suite by the midwife after his behaviour became erratic.

And so I decided to make a clean break. He came around to 'pick up some stuff' from his study and I told him in no uncertain terms to leave and not come back. I was done with it, and if he couldn't help himself then I didn't have the energy to help him anymore. The last thing I said was "Go fuck yourself Bill Compton."

A few days later we were told he'd been killed in a car crash just past Ngaruawahia, apparently coming back from Hamilton. I don't know why he'd been to Hamilton. And I don't know why some woman called Selah Pumphrey was in the car with him. And I don't know why he couldn't have just got the help he needed.

The funeral and everything after is a blur. Felicia was just so small that I couldn't really register what was going on. Judith and Calvin were a god send. Even Sarah managed to keep Lorena, who was looking as though she might throw herself into the grave at any minute, away from me so I could just get through it.

But it's getting better now. I'm pretty sure I'm getting over it. Just being out in the workforce again is doing wonders. And I have my girls, as crazy as they drive me. They may not have a father, but they have me, and they have their aunts, and cousins and even Lorena.

I finished off the weekend by packing up some of the baby clothes Felicia had grown out of. I knew that soon I'd have to put them on TradeMe; it was the sensible thing to do. After all, she was most likely my last baby ever. Who'd want me now? I was 34, a widow with two small children, and a heart that had been stomped all over by the only man I'd ever trusted. A man who obviously hadn't loved me enough.

So there you go. Was it what everyone expected?

Taranaki is pronounced Ta-rah-nack-ee and it's a region in the central North Island.

Ngaruawahia is pronounced Nah-roo-a-wa-he-a (well, pretty much).

TradeMe is our equivalent of Ebay. NZers love a bargain and we love TradeMe. In many workplaces the site is banned.

P is the latest drug to make headlines here. I think the equivalent in the US would be crystal meth? Anyway, it's made from all the cold medicines so there are normally stories about how many packets of cold tablets people have tried to smuggle into NZ.

Bumbo seats (for those who don't know) are actually a South African designed thing, a small one pieced rubber seat that even babies who can't quite sit on their own can use.

Thanks for reading!