Lottie's breath caught in her throat. It was hard for her to see him brought low by emotion. Her Bill was a granite slab of a man, strong, solid, and reliable. Yes, at times he was a maddening fool, but he was her fool: spending too much of his wages down the pub, coming home grumpy, giving the boys too rough a go about the choices they made. The list of his faults was long... but then there were his good qualities: letting baby Kate play with his moustache while she sat on his lap, working extra days to put a nicer dinner on the table at Christmas, playing cricket (in the house!) with the boys when they were little. In Lottie's eyes, Bill's positives were many.

She hadn't seen her father-in-law in decades, even if she only imagined meeting him at all. For her husband, his past was like a suit of ugly clothes that was never worn, stored only out of guilt, until it was mercifully thrown away. As for cowardice, what a lie. Would a coward have pulled a scared, desperate, and lost young woman out of the path of the oncoming express train? She'd always be grateful to him for that.

"Ye shouldn't blame yeself," she offered quietly. "Yer not a coward, Bill. Ye never have been. Ye saved me, remember? Yer always been my rock. This is just... a shadow. And we'll get through it. Together."