“Right.” For the thousandth time he regrets that they picked a site so far from civilization. Amazon doesn’t even deliver out here, and Tom has to collect mail from a tiny shop that only opens twice a week in a village ten miles across terrain that he’s sure is annihilating the suspension on their Mercedes with every trip.
“Let’s try the egg yolks and water, shall we?” he offers at last.
“We have eggs?” Gaia asks brightly. She had a sneaky egg once at a friend’s house and it was delicious.
Tom doesn’t respond. The eggs belong to Maren—gifted from a farmer on the other side of the fjord—but he’s sure she can manage without one on this occasion. “We’ll get dog kibble later this afternoon, OK?”
“Will that be too late?” Gaia asks. He tells her no, it’ll be fine, and proceeds to rifle through the cupboards for a cappuccino cup in which to hold the egg. His movements are too clumsy and he sends a glass toppling to the floor, where it shatters. Gaia screams and Coco laughs. He finds a small dish, but in his haste to retrieve it from the cupboard he sends a mug to the floor. Another almighty crash, ceramic on tile. The mug is one of Aurelia’s, and even as he glances down and spies the duck-egg-blue fragments rearranged like a modernist sculpture, he recalls taking her that very mug, filled with steaming-hot tea, whilst she nursed Coco in bed. He feels tears of anger prick his eyes. He wants to punch something.
“Is everything all right?” a voice asks.
He twists from his stooped position over the glass—he’s picking up shards with his bare hands before Coco can plant one of her knees or palms on them—to see a girl in the doorway. Sophie, the nanny. She looks disheveled, her black hair sticking out like that bloke from the Cure and a purple bra strap visible from where her nightie has slipped down one shoulder. He wonders if he should ask her about this Sad Lady nonsense. She’ll be able to explain it.
But in the handful of seconds that he’s been distracted, Coco has padded across to the shattered mug and glass, and Sophie lunges forward, scooping her up right as Coco makes for a jagged shard of glass sitting up from the floor like a stalagmite.
“Oh, no, you don’t, my lovely,” Sophie tells Coco, who wriggles and squirms to be down, as though hell-bent on finding anything with which she might injure herself. Like Aurelia, he thinks, and his mood spirals into shame.
“Come on, girls,” Sophie tells Coco and Gaia. “Let’s go play while Daddy sorts out that mess.”
“Are you sure?” he asks Sophie. It’s Sunday. It’s her day off, and suddenly it strikes him that the reason she looks so . . . untethered is because she’s catching up on sleep. It’s how Aurelia started to look on weekends. Go back to bed, he’d tell her, and she’d give him a look of deep gratitude before returning to their bedroom and staying there until evening.
“Yep,” Sophie says, throwing him a smile. A yawn catches her by surprise.
“But Dora,” Gaia says, and she proceeds to tell Sophie all about the nestling they found, and how she desperately needs water and dog food, and please can Sophie save her, please, please?
Tom fetches the vacuum cleaner when he concedes that they mustn’t own a dustpan and brush and sucks up the broken glass and mug while Sophie and Gaia endeavor to revive Dora. A chorus of squeals and claps indicates that the bird has taken a few sips. Gaia is crying, Sophie hugs her tightly, and a great wave of gratitude rolls over him.
“I’ll get dressed,” he hears Sophie tell Gaia. “And we’ll go find Dora’s mum. Deal?”
Gaia nods, swiping tears from her cheeks. “Deal.”
An odd indignity warms him, and before he can exert any self-control he’s striding toward Sophie and murmuring that the mother bird will likely reject its nestling, given that it’s been handled by humans. “Look, I think it’s kinder if we just tell Gaia the truth,” he says. “It’s going to die whatever we do.”
“Oh, no,” Sophie says. “That’s just an old wives’ tale. The rejected-because-of-human-smell thing.” She smiles to show she’s not interested in proving him wrong but that the possibility of the nestling being restored to the nest—and thus, pleasing Gaia infinitely—is in their mutual interests.