Dan was glad of the unscheduled break in their conversation. He suddenly realized they had been talking at cross-purposes. He pulled out a chair from the table and sat down. “Why did you not tell me?” he asked, concerned.

Millie instantly stopped crying and turned to face him with an expression of fury. “What do you mean? We are always telling you, Dad, but you never, ever listen. You just go on about making the best of things and that it will only be for another few years of our lives. But what you don’t understand, Dad, is that every day at the place is like another year.”

Dan covered his mouth with his hand. His misunderstanding of the situation went much deeper than just getting the wrong end of the stick during their recent talk. They were not the ones who were at fault here. It was he. He had been stupid, blind, and pigheaded enough to think that he could just mess around with his daughters’ lives. If he had gone out and found himself a job, as Jackie had always been telling him to do, then this would never have happened. But he had to have his principles, didn’t he? He had to have his own way. All that business about “being around for a family who needed him.” It was all a load of crap. They hadn’t needed him around. They had needed him working.

He leaned forward in his chair and sat pressing the nails of his thumbs together, not wishing to look up at his daughters’ faces. “It really is that bad, is it?”

“Yes, Dad, it is,” Millie said quietly. “My work is really suffering, and I know that Nina isn’t being given a chance at all. And we just have no friends there, even though we’ve tried hard to make them.”

Dan let out a long sigh and scratched his fingers at the back of his head. “This is just so stupid.”

Millie’s shoulders slumped despondently. “I knew that’s all you would say.”

“No, I didn’t mean it that way. I’m going to send you both back to Alleyn’s.”

Millie looked up and glanced across at her sister. “But you can’t. It would mean . . .”

Dan shook his head. “No. There’s no alternative. You’re going back to Alleyn’s. I have no right to make your lives such a misery. If I wanted to give up work, that was my decision. If you wanted to stay on at Alleyn’s, then that should have been yours. I should never have taken that privilege away from you.” He laid his hands, palm-down, on the table. “I’ll speak to your mother when she gets back from Italy, or wherever she is, and tell her what we’re going to do, all right?”