staggered quickly to her room, expecting to find it full of bats or giant spiders, and when I found neither I tried to console Gaia with a glass of water. She held my hand in a viselike grip, and when I woke again—once more to the sound of screaming—I was on the wooden floor beside Gaia’s bed huddled beneath a blanket. Again, I settled her to sleep by stroking her face and holding her hand, and this time she said, “I love you, Mumma,” between tear-stricken gasps. I was exhausted, but my heart broke for her.
This went on every night, with a side order of Coco waking every couple of hours. Coco didn’t shriek, though. She was sturdier than Gaia, in both build and temperament, her shining round cheeks always lifted in a gleeful smile. She was quite a heartening child to be around. At night, she babbled and bounced in her cot until I deduced that a warm bottle of milk persuaded her to lie down and quietly mull over the idea of sleep.
One night, when I’d put Gaia back into her bed for the millionth time and fallen asleep beside her, I was woken not by screaming but by a question.
“Sophie?”
“Hmm? What?”
“Are you going to die?”
“What?”
“Are you going to die?”
“Die? Uh, no, Gaia. Not at the moment. I’m too tired.”
“What about tomorrow?”
“Why are you so worried about me dying, Gaia?”
She was sitting up in bed, her hair a fuzzy cloud and her glasses askew on her face. Her pajamas—navy with a snowdrop print—were buttoned wrongly, and Louis was sitting at her feet. She bounced my question around her mind.
“Mumma died,” she said softly, and my heart expanded to the size of a football pitch. I wrapped my arm around her.
“I know she did. I’m so, so sorry. I bet she loved you lots and lots.”
I thought of what Ellen had said about their mother. Suicide. How awful. The party line is that Mummy had an accident. How long, I wondered, could they really expect to keep up that pretense? Gaia was a very perceptive child, visibly possessed of that firstborn curse of wisdom beyond her years. If her mum died by suicide there would have been signs. Gaia would have known something was wrong.
Gaia buried her face in my side and wrapped her arms and legs around me so tightly I thought I would be left with bruises. She caught one of the scars on my right arm with her wrist and I yelped in pain.
“What’s wrong?” she whispered, panicked.
“Nothing,” I said, though my arm was in a white-hot kind of agony. “All better now.”
“Don’t leave,” she whispered. “Please, Sophie. Please don’t die?”
“I won’t,” I said. “I promise.”
“Pinky promise?”
“What?”
She held out her little finger. “Pinky promise. You have to use your pinky. Like this.”
She demonstrated what I needed to do by hooking her pinky around mine.
And as I lay there in the darkness with Gaia clamped to me like a warm, snoring limpet, I felt a stab of guilt for the dozens of times I’d looked out the window of the playroom at the woods and the fjord beyond and regretted what I’d signed up for. I’d even thought about running away. It wasn’t that I thought the girls weren’t sweet or that the landscape wasn’t mesmeric—I just felt so completely out of my depth.
And yet it seemed I was the only one vaguely interested in looking after Gaia and Coco. Already I had a sense that the other adults around them—Tom, Clive, and Maren—were fairly clueless in their own ways. After all, they’d hired me as a nanny, and while Tom was full of promises to sit and have dinner with us, or to read Gaia a bedtime story, he was perpetually distracted. He worked from dawn until dusk on the build, wafting into the house at odd moments to snatch a cup of coffee or a cigarette from the packet I noticed he kept hidden behind the toaster, before wafting back into the gloom of the forest like a ghost. He didn’t appear to eat. Clive was fairly absent, too, but then he was only Tom’s business partner, and nothing to do with Gaia and Coco. I had forgotten he was staying at the house until I caught sight of him in the hall one morning. We exchanged a pleasant hello and he went on his way.
Maren spent most of the time doing housework and ironing everything to within an inch of its life. I can