And now, with Zac’s exclusion from school, the latest in a depressingly long line of offences, she was starting to wonder if this was impossible. If she just couldn’t do it, no matter how hard she hoped or tried, or what her best intentions had been when her sister Abby had checked herself into a four-week private rehab facility a little more than a week ago.

Utterly out of the blue, Laurel had received a phone call from a staff member at the facility, informing her that Abby had asked her to take care of Zac, the nephew she’d seen, at most, a handful of times since he’d been born.

“But what’s happened? Where is she? Is Abby okay?” The questions had bubbled out of Laurel like lava, but the staff member had refused to give anything away.

“She is in a private facility,” she’d said repressively, while Laurel’s mind had spun emptily. She hadn’t known her sister had been battling some kind of addiction, if that was even what the problem was. She hadn’t known much about her sister at all, because Abby had walked away from her and their family life over twenty years ago, and Laurel could count the number of times she’d seen her since then on one hand. Not including her thumb.

Now, with this sudden request to take care of the nephew she’d seen sporadically over the years, she had no idea what to do, or how to feel.

“Take care of him...” she’d repeated dumbly, a cup of tea cooling by her elbow, her laptop screen on the current batch of edits of a medical journal, and her cat Mistral curled up in her lap. Outside the window of her study, York Minster’s majestic Gothic spires pierced a wintry sky. “You mean, in London?”

“She’s left instructions at her flat and a key with the doorman,” the staff member had replied neutrally. “She said you would be amenable.”

Amenable? That felt rich, coming from a sister who had chosen to cut herself out of Laurel’s life as if she were wielding a particularly sharp pair of scissors. And yet of course Laurel was amenable, because no matter how Abby had walked away, or how much it had hurt, she’d been there when it had mattered. Even though they’d become more or less estranged for all of Laurel’s adulthood, she owed Abby her life, or at least her childhood.

Her job as a freelance copyeditor meant she could work from anywhere, and things were slow around Christmas as it was. And so Laurel had dropped everything to come to London to look after Zac, picking him up from school to both their bewilderment; he barely knew who she was, and she’d had to ask a teacher to point him out. Awkward didn’t even begin to cover it.

And yet, despite all that, Laurel had been buoyed by an indefatigable optimism that had been the touchstone of her life. Admittedly, some of her friends had pointed out, kindly, that her optimism was more naiveté than anything else, and others had told her that expecting a hero worthy of a Jane Austen adaptation wasn’t optimism, but delusion, and yet...