was clear: the fault lay with him. He flushed, as he always does when her name is mentioned, and I let it drop, but something had nagged me like a sore tooth, and it wasn’t until the following day that I worked it out. The nightmares had started before Katya left.
“Excuse me.” A young boy—maybe nine or ten—puts his hand up and waves his fingers as if he’s in class and needs the loo. Next to him, his mother is stretched out on the flat bed, her mouth slightly open beneath an eye mask with Charging—do not unplug embroidered on the satin fabric.
“Hello, what’s your name?”
“Finley Masters.”
I smile. “Hello, Finley. Would you like something to drink?”
“My headphones are tangled.” The boy looks at me earnestly, and I feel the sudden tug in my chest that so often ambushes me when I’m away from Sophia.
“Oh dear, that’s very serious. Let’s see if we can sort it out, shall we?” I use my nails to pick at the knots in the cable, returning it to him with a smile.
“Thank you.”
“Any time.”
Finley’s the only child in business class, although right at the front of the middle section, there’s a couple with a tiny baby. He’s crying, a kitten’s mewl—not loud, but insistent—and I catch the anxious look between his parents. I smile at them, trying to convey that it doesn’t matter, but they’re fussing over the baby’s clothes as though the key to his discomfort lies in the way his Babygro is fastened instead of the pressure building in his tiny ears.
I check the passenger list—Paul and Leah Talbot—and go to see if they need anything. Their baby can’t be more than a month old.
“Three weeks and two days,” Leah says when I ask. She’s Australian, her hair sun-bleached and her face tanned and freckled. Straight, white teeth give her a wholesome, outdoor look, and I imagine her and her husband barbecuing on the beach come Christmas Day. Maybe Adam, Sophia, and I will do that one year—escape the cold and run off to the sunshine.
Still Adam, then? my inner therapist prompts.
“What a cutie! What’s his name?” I ignore my subconscious. It’s habit, that’s all. Five years of being a family. Adam’s made it perfectly clear where his priorities lie, and they aren’t with his wife and daughter.
“He’s a beaut, alright.” Leah beams at her son. She’s older than me—well into her forties, I’d guess—but in far better shape. “Meet Lachlan Hudson Samuel Talbot.”
“That’s a lot of names.”
Her husband grins. “We couldn’t decide.” His accent is English but with the upward inflection at the end of a sentence that expats down under so readily acquire.
“You look amazing,” I tell Leah. “I can’t believe you’ve just given birth!”
The compliment embarrasses her, and she drops her lips to the baby’s head, breathing in his smell. Her husband puts an arm around her, and it feels as though they’re shutting me out, that I’ve said something wrong.
“If you need me to take him later so you can get some sleep, just let me know.”
“Thanks.”
I leave them, an ache in my heart as though I’ve swallowed a stone. Adopting hasn’t taken away the grief of infertility, hasn’t stopped the occasional but visceral longing for a taut, full belly or the barely there weight of a minute-old baby. Sophia is my world—you don’t have to give birth to be a mother—but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt to think of what might have been.
At the very least, I wish Sophia had come to us as a newborn. It could have happened. It should have happened. Her mother was already on a watch list; Social Services was hovering, the older siblings already in care. But there was a process to follow, and it robbed us of the first year of Sophia’s life and Sophia of the ability to trust. It robbed us of the family we could have been.
Neither Adam nor I had been able to sleep the night before Sophia came home for the first time, for fear we’d mess it up.
“What if I never feel like I’m her real dad?”
“You will! Of course you will.” I knew Adam was nervous—he’d taken longer than me to come around to the idea of adoption—but I knew, too, that he’d soon fall for Sophia. Families are built from love, not genes.
Only he and Sophia never seemed to bond. She was demanding, even as a baby, and wouldn’t be settled by either of us. Eventually, she allowed me to rock her