safe and I won’t leave her again. I won’t fly… I’m seized by the absurd thought that someone knows what happened at training school: that I survived when I should have died. That I cheated destiny.
“It is just turbulence,” Erik says from the jump seat next to me. I peel my fingers from my kneecaps. He thinks I’m scared we’re going to crash, but what I’m scared of is so much worse than crashing.
Why would Kirkwood have a picture of Sophia?
Could he be connected to her birth family? Years ago, we ran into her maternal grandmother at a soft play center, and I can still remember the visceral fear that gripped me when I saw her watching Sophia. Does the family want her back? In five years, they’ve never tried to contact us.
I can’t shake the thought that this is punishment—karma—for all the times I’ve moaned about my daughter’s behavior, for all the times I’ve clenched my fists and wailed to the ceiling, I can’t do this anymore!
I wrote a note to myself once. We’d had a perfect day playing games in the park—Adam, me, and Sophia—and we rounded it off with hot chocolate, all three of us in dressing gowns at the kitchen table. Adam put Sophia to bed, and I got out my phone and wrote a note, in among the shopping lists and the myriad reminders to find a plumber and get my coil checked.
I love my daughter, it started.
I love the way she’s memorized every fact on the information boards in the zoo. I love that she’s confident enough to tell another family that, It’s an ape, actually—monkeys have tails. I love that she wanted to give that little boy another ice cream when he dropped his. I love how funny she is, and how clever she is, and how hungry she is to learn new things. Mostly, I love that she’s ours, and we’re hers.
Three days later, as Sophia screamed that she hated me, that she wanted me to die, I locked myself in the downstairs loo and read the note over and over.
I love my daughter, I love my daughter, I love my daughter.
What kind of mother needs a reminder like that?
Me. I do. Because trying to remember that you love someone who is screaming that they hate you, who has hurled the tea you lovingly made them across the floor, is like trying to recall summer when it’s minus two outside. It’s trying to imagine ever being hungry again when you’re groaning after Sunday lunch. They are transient, slippery sensations, too quickly forgotten, remembered in the abstract way but not felt.
I love my daughter.
I don’t need that note right now. I don’t need a reminder. I don’t even need to picture my daughter’s face or summon a memory. What I feel for Sophia floods through every vein, every nerve ending until it is all-consuming. Unqualified, unending love.
And fear.
I search my memory for details from the first half of the flight, but there’s nothing that stands out, no sign that Roger Kirkwood was paying me particular attention. His wallet yielded nothing of use. A platinum World Airlines frequent flyer card, a photograph—a properly printed one this time—of what could be his wife and grown-up children, and a business card that tells me he was a sales director for a soft drinks firm.
Just as we’re released from our seats, I realize something. The photograph of his wife was carefully inserted into the notes section of Kirkwood’s wallet, the business card slotted in among the credit and loyalty cards. But the picture of Sophia wasn’t technically in his wallet, merely slipped between the folded leather. It was, I think—mentally summoning the moment I retrieved it from his jacket pocket—not carefully filed there but crumpled, as though it had been pushed in hurriedly.
Could someone have put the photograph in Kirkwood’s pocket without his knowledge? Did they kill him too? Is the person who brought Sophia’s EpiPen and photograph on board a murderer?
I head for the bar, ignoring the muttered complaints from Erik that I’m shirking my duties.
Finley puts up his hand as I pass, and I bite back my frustration. “I’m a bit busy at the moment; maybe your mum could help. Shall we wake her up? She might be hungry anyway.”
“She said not to. She hates flying, so she takes a pill that makes her sleep the whole way.”
“Lucky old mum,” I say between gritted teeth. I take the headphones, which are even more tangled than