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“With those letters, yes. It wouldn’t be immediate. These things take time, but I’ve handled several divorce cases. I would gladly help guide you,” he said.

She opened her mouth but then closed it again. A part of her yearned to say yes, but it was impossible to override more than a decade of careful choices so quickly.

“I don’t know if I can do it,” she said, her voice cracking a little.

He reached out a hand, but he stopped just short of touching her.

“Sylvia,” he said quietly, “don’t you deserve to be happy?”

She stared at their hands. To be a divorced woman… It wouldn’t just mean the end of her married life. It would mean being alone, and that frightened her more than she could say.

“I can’t become my mother,” she whispered.

“You wouldn’t be—”

She shook her head emphatically. “William, you didn’t know my mother before coming to Glengall Road. She was a sweet, loving woman, quick to laugh and easy with a joke. Then my father died and everything changed. She was alone in the world with two children and no money. The shop saved her, but it killed her too.”

“You don’t know that,” he said softly.

“I do,” she said firmly. “How could it have not? Every night she would drag herself up the stairs from the workroom to the flat, overworked and defeated. She always had some complaint or another—an aching back, tired eyes, fingers that had been pricked over and over again by pins. Even when the business began to do well enough, there was never enough money to save her from the fear that one day it would all disappear again.

“She used to try to hide it from Izzie, but she was honest with me about how much she resented needing to work again. She blamed the Sheltons, who refused to help her. She blamed my father. She blamed me.”

“Why would she blame you? You were just a child when your father died.”

She squeezed her eyes closed. “Because I’m the reason Papa died.”

“Sylvia, you can’t be serious.”

“I am.”

“But your father died in a traffic accident,” he said. “How could that be your fault?”

“He was only on that road that evening because of me,” she said, the truth she’d kept locked away in her heart for so many years pouring out of her. “It was my birthday and he was buying me flowers. Sunflowers. They were always my favorite, and he would bring them home for my birthday every year even though they were out of season. I insisted on it even though it meant that he had to go to an entirely different neighborhood to a florist that sold hothouse flowers.

“If it hadn’t been for me, he never would have been taking that route home. The lorry driver never would have hit him.”

“Sylvia, you weren’t to know. No one could have known.”

The tenderness in his voice sliced into her. She didn’t deserve his pity.

“Oh, I knew that if I demanded something, Papa would go and fetch it for me. He used to call me his little princess, which my mother hated. She told him he should stop spoiling me.

“Have you ever noticed that I call him Papa and Izzie calls him Dad?” she asked.

“I don’t suppose I ever really thought about it, but now that you mention it,” said William.

“That was my mother’s doing. She thought ‘Papa’ sounded like I was putting on airs, but that was how he referred to himself so she let it go. However, Izzie was so young when he died that, when my mother began to call him ‘Dad,’ Izzie followed suit. I think it was her way of proving I thought I was above her way of doing things. She was always a bit spiky about the fact that she’d married up.

“After Papa’s death, my mother was furious at me. She told me it was all my fault. It only became worse after she found out about Papa’s debts. The house was mortgaged and mortgaged again, and it seems that he hadn’t been making the payments. Papa’s family turned their backs on her, and she was left scrambling. All because of me.”

“You were only eleven,” said William, still trying to soothe her. She didn’t want his kind words. She didn’t deserve them.

“When we moved into the flat, I threw a tantrum because I didn’t want to share a bedroom with my sister. I’d never had to before, and I didn’t understand why I should start at eleven. My mother grabbed me by the shoulders and slapped me. She told me that this was all my fault and that if I hadn’t been so demanding my father would still be alive and we’d still be living in our old house with our old life.”

William pulled out his handkerchief and handed it to her.

“Thank you,” she sniffed, dabbing at her tears. “It’s silly crying really. It was so many years ago.”