She raised her pert nose in the air as she sat, dropping bags of purchases around her feet. “Who says the pie is for you? Mum specifically said it was for Jasper,notyou.”
Oh, lord.He was inseriousshite if his mother intended for her pie to bypass him altogether. “You didn’t answer. What have I done now?”
“You haven’t been to dinner in ages.Months,Archie. Mum wonders if you’re upset with her, and Billy doesn’t even remember your face.”
Archie scowled. “Billy is not even a year yet,” he said, referring to his newest nephew. “He can’t distinguish between me and a sheep. And it’s been five weeks—”
“Six!” she interjected.
“Which is hardly months.”
“It’s more than one month, and that doesn’t change that Mum isdevastated.”
Archie sighed, removed his glasses, and pinched the bridge of his nose. Florence always had a flair for the dramatic, particularly when it involved their family. Desperate to escape the house, she married when she was sixteen to a saddler’s apprentice only a few years older. To their pleasant surprise, Patrick had a talent for leatherwork and, in the intervening decade, had made a name for himself in southern Yorkshire.
“Mum isn’t devastated,” he said, wondering if he was saying the truth. “She’d tell me.”
“I’m telling you, she is.” She affected her voice with a high pitch and pressed the back of her hand to her brow. “Where’s my baby Archie? Oh, what have I done to hurt him?”
“I’m not her baby, and she has done nothing. I have a new business, remember? And you wouldn’t bring a tart unless there was something else going on. What is it?”
She had the decency to blush. “Fine, Mum isn’t angry with you.”
“I knew it.” He didn’t know it.
“But I’m worried about her.”
Any relief he felt at knowing his mother wasn’t actually angry with him was washed away on a wave of fear. “What’s wrong?”
Florence bobbed her head from side to side. “She’s getting older, Arch. She can’t get around as easily. The chores are harder. Her hands hurt.”
He’d noticed the rheumatism knotting his mother’s knuckles the last time he’d been at the farm. Which had been… Christ, it had been too long. “Are the girls helping?”
Two of his sisters still lived at home, the oldest at seventeen and the youngest eleven. “Yes, but they have school. Some fences were damaged in the storm last week, and the girls weren’t strong enough to repair them. Patrick is too busy to get away, and I can’t help with the baby at home.”
“Do I need to go to the farm, Flo?” he interrupted, sure he would suffocate under much more of the guilt she layered on him.
She recoiled. “No! You could help, but you don’thaveto.”
“You promised you’d tell me if I needed to go home.” He couldn’t fight the panic lacing into his voice. His four older sisters lived in the village nearest the farm, and they’d sworn they would let him know the moment their mother couldn’t manage the modest property alone anymore. He had prayed the practice would be taking in enough income by that point to hire some workers to help his mother, maybe even enough to rent a townhouse in Rotherham, where the younger girls didn’t have to wake before dawn to attend school. Where Samantha could be courted by someone decent and Eloise could read every book in the library and—
“And it’s not time for that. But Arch, what if she falls, or…” Florence trailed off, and his mind supplied the memory of last year, when she’d gotten dizzy carrying the laundry in. He’d come home to repair a hole in the barn’s ceiling and found her in a puddle of her own blood.
“I still want to move her into town, closer to you,” he said, and Florence gave him a soft smile. The oldest siblings had concocted their plan after their mother’s fall. With families of their own, noneof his older sisters could support their mother, so the responsibility fell to him. Not that he resented the burden, but he saw it as an opportunity to make amends for his failures in the past. Archie would buy the finest townhouse he could afford, the perfect place for his mother and sisters, maybe even with staff, a housemaid and a cook. He’d live in his tiny flat above the office for as long as necessary. “But I don’t have the funds yet.”
She grabbed his hand over the desk. “I didn’t expect you to. We’re all trying, putting aside whatever we can. The responsibility isn’t entirely yours.”
But who else would the responsibility belong to? He’d carried the load for so long he had no idea how to put it down. “I have a great case now, and it might make the difference I need.”
Her brows rose. “Really? What is it?”
“A divorce.”
She wrinkled her nose and sat back. “A divorce! Arch, is that what you want to spend your days doing?” She lowered her voice, as though their shared childhood was a dirty secret Jasper didn’t already know about. “Will you be alright doing that sort of work?”
“If it pays, I have to be.” He ignored her scoff. “And this case is… special.”
“Special how?”
