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Bianca Whitmore.
She was wearing an old coat, washed so many times the colour had gone, and her hair was loose and tangled. The sharpness that had been all over her six months ago was entirely gone. She looked hollowed out.
When she saw me, she dropped to her knees on the pavement.
Right there, in front of everyone leaving work, in front of every commuter walking past.
"Sylvia, please. I'm begging you. Help me."
She reached for my leg. I stepped back before she could touch me.
"Lucas cut us off. All the money — he put it all into your account. Margaret's kidney failure has got worse, she's in intensive care, and the costs are — every day it's —" She was crying, the ugly messy kind. "Hugo's sick too. I know what I did. I know I don't deserve anything. But for the sake of what Margaret did for you all those years, could you spare anything at all? Just a little. We have nothing."
People around us had begun to slow down. Someone had already taken out a phone.
"Bianca."
I spoke at a normal volume. In the quiet that had gathered around us, it carried.
"Margaret is unwell. You need money for her care. Is that right?"
She nodded frantically, a flicker of hope in her eyes.
"Yes. Whatever you give — I'll spend my whole life paying it back. Anything."
I didn't respond to her. I looked up, taking in the people around us — commuters, colleagues, strangers.
"I'd like to ask everyone here something."
My voice was the same as it always was. I might have been explaining a project in a meeting.
"Suppose a woman spent years pretending to be someone's cousin. She drugged a married man's drink, slept with him, and had a child by him. Over four years, she systematically undermined his marriage. She came to his wife's home and used the worst trauma of the wife's life — something that happened to her at sixteen — to taunt her."
"Because of what she did, the wife was assaulted by her own husband in her own bathtub. She lost a pregnancy she'd been carrying for six months. Her doctors told her she'll likely never carry another child."
"Now this woman's scheme has been discovered. Her partner has ended things. And she's come here, in public, to ask the wife for money."
I looked out at the faces around us.
"Would you give your money to someone who destroyed your life?"
The pavement was completely silent.
A moment ago, some of those faces had held sympathy for the woman on her knees. Now they didn't.
Bianca's face had turned grey.
"You're lying," she said. Her voice had gone thin. "You're twisting everything —"
"Ask Lucas. He has the documentation."
I stepped around her.
"The Ashford family is no longer my concern. As for you — you planted what you planted, Bianca. You'll have to live with the harvest."
I walked to the underground entrance without looking back.
Behind me I heard her crying, and the sound of people starting to talk.