A few years after Daisy’s death, Mary Flanagan had managed to get a letter to Marilyn, through her divorce lawyer. She wrote that she was newly sober, doing a twelve-step program, and wanted to make amends. To explain herself. At the time of her affair with Herbert, she said, she was grieving her husband. She was drinking too much; she was in a fog. She wrote that she had been there the morning of Daisy’s birthday, when Marilyn came home unannounced. She knew then what a wonderful mother Marilyn was, and tried to end it with Herbert. She would regret for the rest of her life that she didn’t
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