A Measured Thread

Fifty years is a long time to keep a secret.Looking back on her life, Maggie O'Connor is rightfully pleased. Fifty years ago she left Ireland with a single suitcase and a dream. After a long and satisfying career, she is enjoying retirement on her farm in rural Wisconsin - until she falls.Determined to regain her independence, she hires Isobel, a young woman who is also an emigrant. Helping Maggie clean house, Isobel finds a cache of letters that Maggie wrote to her parents those many years ago and begins to read them aloud to Maggie.But the letters contain a secret, one that Maggie has kept for fifty years. A secret that threatens to destroy her life and that of the people around her. With little time left, she must make a choice - give up, or face her past.A Measured Thread is a powerful story that explores questions of guilt, abandonment, redemption, and the consequences of the choices we make. Mary Behan is a retired professor of neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She devotes her time to writing fiction, memoir and short stories. Her first book, Abbey Girls, is a memoir she wrote with her sister, Valerie Behan, about their childhood in Ireland. She lives with her husband in the Driftless Area of southwest Wisconsin in a historic log cabin overlooking a tallgrass prairie.