“No!” Sophia pops out from behind a wheelie bin and barrels into Becca. “I’m here!”
“Oh my goodness, you were hiding! I thought you’d vanished into thin air!”
Blood roars in my ears as I bend down, grabbing Sophia’s arm and pulling her to me. “Don’t ever do that again, do you hear? Anything could have happened.”
“She was just playing—”
I cut Becca dead with a glare and make Sophia look at me. Her bottom lip wobbles.
“Sorry, Daddy.”
My face feels hot, a sharp pricking behind my eyes. Slowly, my heart rate returns to normal. I give Sophia a quick smile. Release her arm and tweak her hat straight. “You scared me, Soph.”
She looks at me, dark eyes holding mine for so long, it’s as if she knows all my secrets. “Daddies don’t get scared.”
“Everyone gets scared sometimes,” I say lightly. She lets me hold her hand the rest of the way home, and I wonder if she knows how much it means to me. I catch Becca looking at me, her eyebrows alone somehow managing to convey that she thinks I overreacted. She doesn’t say so, of course. Not like Mina would. You’re such a doom merchant, she says. Always convinced the worst is going to happen.
Guilty as charged. But that’s because it so often does.
“Mummy’s on a plane,” Sophia says as I help her out of her wellies. I bang them together and leave them on the doormat, along with the boots I wear for work. Our house—2 Farm Cottages—is the middle one of three terraced houses that once belonged to the farm a mile farther out.
“That’s right.”
All three cottages have gardens that back on to a park where there are huge oak trees and a path that forms a figure of eight. In one half of the eight is a children’s playground and in the other a small lake, complete with a tiny island with a duck house. There’s a wildflower meadow that’s a riot of foxgloves and cornflowers in the summer, with a path Sophia loves to run through.
“She’s going to be on a plane for twenty hours, then she’s coming home again, and that’ll take twenty hours too, but she’ll stay in a hotel in between.”
“That’s right.”
“Clever girl,” Becca says, looking at her phone.
“It’s a Boeing triple seven, and it’s got three hundred and fifty-three people on it.”
“Yes.” Mummy, Mummy, always Mummy…
“Where is she?”
I count to five and summon my patience. “You just told me where she is. She’s on a plane.”
“Yes, but where ’zackly?”
Are there other men who feel the way I do? Other men whose children only ever want to be with their mums? Are there other dads who constantly feel like the consolation prize, no matter how hard they try? I guess I’ll never know, because finding out would mean telling someone how shit it feels when your daughter only ever wants someone else.
I get out my phone and bring up the tracking app beloved by plane spotters and far-flung family. “Mummy is…” I wait for the app to load Mina’s plane. “Here.”
“Bell-are-us.”
“Roos. Like in goose. Belarus.”
Sophia repeats it, studying the word on the screen, and I know she’ll remember for next time. She never forgets anything.
“Nostrovia,” Becca says.
“You what?”
She wanders into the kitchen, leaving her wellies in a puddle on the tiles. “It’s Russian for cheers.”
I move her boots to the mat and look at the blinking dot on my phone that represents Mina at thirty-five thousand feet. Soon, the blinking dot will move across Russia’s airspace, and then Kazakhstan’s, and then China’s. Finally, it’ll cross the Philippines, then Indonesia, and then, before Sophia and I wake up, she’ll have crossed Australia and landed in Sydney.
“Twenty hours,” I’d said when Mina told me she was going. “That’s a hell of a shift.”
“I don’t run the airline, Adam.”
I left a beat of silence before I spoke again, refusing to rise to the argument she was trying to start. “Still, it’ll be nice to have a few days in Sydney at this time of year.”
“It’s not a holiday!”
I’d given up. We were standing outside school—a handover of Elephant, who’d been inadvertently left behind that morning. Sophia had thrown her arms around Mina, then nodded at me as if we’d met once at a networking conference: And what is it you do again? I’d been granted a few hours with my daughter, with strict instruction to return her by six.
Mina had kept picking. “Stop trying to make me feel guilty, Adam. This is my