hold her gaze for a moment, wondering if that smile hides something else. Disappointment? Guilt? But her expression is guileless, and I look away, refolding Sophia’s damp jumper. Damn Adam for turning me into the sort of paranoid wife I’ve always pitied.
“He wasn’t sure he’ll be finished work in time, so it was safer to get a babysitter.”
“Where are you off to today?”
“Sydney.”
“On a Boeing 777,” Sophia says. “With three hundred fifty-three passengers. It takes twenty hours to get there, and then they have to come all the way back, and that’s another twenty hours, but they stay in a hotel first.”
“Gosh! How exciting. Will you be away for long?”
“Five days. Back in time for the holidays.”
“They have to have four pilots because it’s such a long way, but they don’t all fly at once. They take turns.”
Sophia’s learned the details of all the planes I fly in. There’s a tour of a 747 on YouTube she must have watched a hundred times. She knows it backward, her lips silently moving in time with the narrator’s. It’s an impressive party trick.
“Sometimes I find it a bit creepy,” I told my dad, my smile an afterthought to soften the confession. Adam and I had recently discovered that Sophia had not, as we’d imagined, been reciting the words of her favorite picture books from memory but was instead reading. She was three years old.
Dad had laughed. He took off his glasses and rubbed them on the bottom of his shirt. “Don’t be daft. She’s a bright girl. She’s destined for great things.” His eyes glistened, and I had to blink hard myself. He missed Mum as much as I did, but I wondered, too, if he was remembering a time when they used to say that about me.
The psychologist concluded Sophia had hyperlexia, the first positive diagnosis in a sea of acronyms and negative labels. Attachment disorder. Attention deficit disorder. Pathological demand avoidance. They don’t put that on the adoption posters.
Adam and I had spent a couple of years trying to conceive. We could have carried on, but the stress was already beginning to get to me, and I could feel myself becoming that woman. The woman who knows exactly when she’s ovulating, who avoids her friends’ baby showers, and commits her savings to cycles of IVF.
“How much does it cost?”
I was somewhere over the Atlantic, spilling my secrets—some of them, at least—to the colleague I was working with that day. Sian was gently maternal, and we were exchanging life stories by the time the wheels had left the tarmac.
“Thousands.”
“Could your parents help out a bit?”
I didn’t tell her about Mum. It was still too raw. As for borrowing money from Dad, after everything that had happened… I shook my head and switched tack. “It isn’t just the money. I’d become obsessed, I know I would. I already am. I want kids, but I also want to stay sane.”
“Fat chance of that.” Sian snorted. “I’ve got four, and I’ve lost another set of marbles with each one.”
We were approved to adopt. It took a while, not least because we’d been very clear that we wanted a child under a year old. Adam’s police work had exposed him to some of the worst products of the care system, and neither of us felt we had what it took to handle that. A baby would be easier, we thought.
We were offered Sophia when she was four months old, taken into care from a neglectful mother whose five previous children had gone the same way. The wheels of adoption move slowly, though, and the months when she was with a foster family and we were without her were endless. We had to show Social Services we were prepared, but at the same time, we were plagued by superstition, Adam going out of his way to walk around ladders and make black cats cross his path. We compromised by filling Sophia’s freshly painted bedroom with everything we needed still in its packaging, ready to go back if anything went wrong.
The court order was granted when Sophia was ten months old, and Adam raced to the recycling center with a car full of cardboard and plastic packaging. We finally had our family. The movies would have you believe that’s the happily ever after. Turns out you have to work a bit harder for that.
Sophia runs off now to join her friends, and I watch her through the glass. Even this far into the term, there are still