She and Robert met at Brigham Young University. After a couple of dates, they stopped dating other people.

After they were married, he started a computer software company. When the babies came, she stayed home to raise the family and keep the house. The two jobs got her full attention, even devotion.

But things started to change even before John was diagnosed with Huntington's.

Robert Bishop was working long hours by this time, so he admits ruefully that he didn't really know what was happening when he was away. Later he would learn that Amy had been changing, becoming more demanding of the children, especially Rebecca and Craig.

Rebecca remembers having to get up at 5 a.m. to do laundry, hauling heavy baskets of clothes to the closets upstairs. She was about 10 at the time. Sometimes, when the clothes were all clean, Amy would take clean clothes out of the closet and make Rebecca wash them again.

If she asked her mother if she could go out and play, Amy would tell her yes, as soon as the chores are finished. Then she would pile them on until at best there were only a few minutes before it would be too late to play outside.

He didn't know the extent of the problem, but Robert knew that something was wrong. Amy sometimes thought that he was seeing someone else. Sometimes she thought that he was abusing the children. She had become "difficult," in her mother's words; "paranoid," is how Robert put it.

Lael and Robert don't agree on some points: For example, she believes he pushed for the genetic testing for Amy. He says they researched it and discussed pros and cons, but Amy made her own decision.

On this point, Robert Bishop and Lael Askew are solid: Each recognizes that the other loves Amy very much. And that, though they handled differently the challenges they faced when they unknowingly married someone with a Huntington's mutation, they each did the best they could.

By the time Amy was tested, it seemed possible that she actually had the illness. She was erratic, angry and even abusive with Robert and the children. It had been almost a year since she'd said a simple "I love you."

When the test results came back, Robert and Amy Bishop took a cruise. During the moonlit evenings, on deck or in exotic ports, they'd talk. "We talked about getting hired help for her, so that she could just take it easy and love the children and be the queen of the house," Robert says.