Sublime

The hurt she’d felt on stumbling across Leah and her friends at lunch returned.

Now she knew for sure. An established artist she admired profoundly had judged her his equal.

In artworks and in the industry, compromise was obvious to her.

Would a family of her own be an enrichment or a duty?

Lally was a decade too old to be the subject of Farr’s interest. What a wounding relief.

Em had a slight lankiness to her. She wasn’t just slim, she was skinny, scrawny maybe, in a way Pat noticed other women noticing.

That they were all in this sticky web together and it just so happened to be her head on the block now, but glasshouses and stones and fuck them

Why not let this be her delicious private secret until then? A secret little spark in her heart.

then the man she left it for kept her dependent on an allowance from him, and even though his death could have made her rich again, she had rejected