Edward VIII Loved Her for 16 Years. The Day Wallis Arrived, He Never Called Again: Freda Dudley Ward

May 1934. A private nursing home in London, and a woman of thirty-nine who has not slept properly in close to a month. Her name: Freda Dudley Ward. For weeks she has lived in a hard chair beside a hospital bed, watching her elder daughter Penelope claw her way back from an emergency appendectomy that came very close to killing her. The doctors now use the word recovering. Freda lifts her head out of the private emergency that swallowed her attention, and for the first time she notices the shape of the silence around her.