No matter that in her old life people deferred to her, recognized her expertise and valued her judgment; in this she was incompetent. She had no qualifications that equipped her for this role. Her childhood had been about surviving. About learning to nurture herself and protect herself while she lived with a mother who was mostly absent—sometimes physically, always emotionally. And after she’d left home, her life had been about studying and working long, punishing hours to silence men determined to prove she was less than they were.

And now here she was, thrown into a life where what she’d learned counted for nothing. A life that required the one set of skills she knew she didn’t possess. She didn’t know how to be this. She didn’t know how to do this. And she’d never had ambitions to do it. It felt like an injustice to find herself in a situation she’d worked hard to avoid all her life.

Beads of sweat formed on her forehead, and she heard Skylar’s voice through a mist of anxiety.

“If having her stops you thinking that, this will turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to you. You weren’t to blame for what happened when you were a child, Em.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Doesn’t change the fact you weren’t to blame. And you don’t need to talk about it because the way you feel is evident in the way you’ve chosen to live your life.”

Emily glanced back at the child sleeping in the car. “I can’t take care of her. I can’t be what she needs.”

“You mean you don’t want to be.”

“My life is adult-focused. I work sixteen-hour days and have business lunches.”

“Your life sucks. I’ve been telling you that for a long time.”

“I liked my life! I want it back.”

“That was the life where you were working like a machine and living with a man with the emotional compass of a rock?”

“I liked my job. I knew what I was doing. I was competent. And Neil and I may not have had a grand passion, but we shared a lot of interests.”

“Name one.”

“I—we liked eating out.”

“That’s not an interest. That’s an indication that you were both too tired to cook.”

“We both enjoyed reading.”

“Wow, that must have made the bedroom an exciting place.”

Emily struggled to come up with something else and failed. “Why are we talking about Neil? That’s over. My whole life now revolves around a six-year-old girl. There is a pair of fairy wings in her bag. I don’t know anything about fairy wings.”

Her childhood had been a barren desert, an exercise in endurance rather than growth, with no room for anything as fragile and destructible as gossamer-thin fairy wings.