Her career had demanded sacrifices, of course. It had claimed its share of sleepless nights, and both of her marriages. Sarah often said that men liked women who didn’t put them in the shade, but she also admitted that two lawyers in a marriage was one too many. She had read a harsh statistic about lawyers’ relationships in a women’s magazine one day – not that she ever looked at them much. She had shown it to her then husband, and they had laughed – but separated a year later.

Work took up virtually all her time. Sarah had missed out on so many shared moments with her kids, passing up on school trips, end-of-year fêtes, dance shows, birthday tea-parties, holidays; and it cost her more than she cared to admit. She knew she could never get back all the moments she had missed, and the thought troubled her. She was no stranger to the working mom’s guilt: it had plagued her ever since Hannah was born, since the dreadful day when she had been forced to leave her in the arms of a nanny, at five days old, and headed out to tackle an emergency at work. But she had very quickly understood there was no place, in her world, for the dramas and dilemmas of a heartbroken mother. She hid her tears under a thick coat of foundation and left for work. She felt torn apart, but there was no one in whom she could confide. She had envied her husband’s cheerful, casual attitude. The fascinating insouciance of men, for whom guilt seemed not to exist. They stepped out the front door with appalling ease, taking nothing with them but their caseload, while she shouldered her burden of guilt, like a tortoise labouring under its shell. At first, she had tried to fight it, reject it, deny it, but she had never been able to. In the end, she had made a place for it in her life. Guilt was her long-time companion, the uninvited guest who accompanied her everywhere. The billboard passed in a field, a wart in the middle of a face; ugly and useless, but there it was. She dealt with it because she had to.