The next morning, Melinda didn't receive much of an explanation about her father's disappearance. "He had to go away for a business meeting," Gramma Plum said, her eyes down. She wasn't very good at lying to her granddaughter. Melinda turned to her mother for an explanation, but she just sat there stonily, not looking at either one of them.
     Two weeks later, her mother left without a trace. Gramma Plum found a letter on the kitchen counter... a letter she never shared with Melinda. But Melinda knew what the letter said anyway; that her mother had left for good, abandoning her only daughter with her old mother.
     Gramma Plum had sat her down that day, and gently told her that her mother wouldn't be back for a while. She had taken a few days to be by herself, she had said. Melinda noticed that she had kept her eyes averted this time, too.

     She suffered through her grief, trying to come to terms with the fact that she had been abandoned; first by her beloved father and then by her mother.
     As she grew older, her grief faded into acceptance. She grew up a serious little girl, rarely smiling, in spite of her grandmother's loving efforts to give her a normal childhood. But she was lonely. She refused to make friends with the neighborhood children for fear that they would abandon her too... She became fiercely independent, and was proud of it.
     There was no one she would ever give her heart to completely, whether it be her mother or father returning from the past, a lover, or even her beloved grandmother. She resolved to live a quiet life alone, practicing medicine from her grandmother's house.