Charlie thought through all the reasons why this was a really bad idea. By the time he was Milla’s age, his ex-wife had burned him to a husk, both personally and professionally. He’d changed everything for her, moved out of the East End, polished up his accent, ignored the way glass called to him as an artist because he’d believed her dreams for them were better than his. Then she’d shattered those dreams in the most public, humiliating way. He’d crawled back to his roots, sown deep in the East End, to friends like Billy, to his family (who, for the most part, refrained from saying I told you that wouldn’t work when he’d stumbled out of the divorce with not even his pride). He’d apprenticed himself to a master glass artist, learned his art, nurtured relationships with the overseas galleries immune to his ex-wife’s influence, giving him an outlet for the work he created once he could even think about art again. Milla was impossible to slot into a neat little compartment like East End boy or West End girl.
