can’t walk that fast.”
“Can so,” Aiden said.
Elm looked at Aiden’s gait, worried. He was still walking a little pigeon-toed.
“But what if we miss it?”
“You’re not going to miss it,” Elm said. “Mary is meeting us at the auction house and she’ll take you. The carnival is going on all afternoon.”
“But we’re only in London for a week.”
“Mama?” Aiden asked.
“No, I can’t carry you,” Elm said. “You’re too much of a big boy.”
“More like a big, slow turtle.”
“That’s enough, Moira. Come here and hold my hand while we cross.”
It was a hot day, and Moira’s annoyance was catching. Aiden continued to stare everywhere but in front of his feet, and Elm was dragging him. The back of Moira’s neck was red and irritated. She was getting sunburned, but it hadn’t occurred to Elm that one needed sun protection in rainy London.
“Da coming?” Aiden asked for the umpteenth time.
“Yes, baby, Daddy will meet us at the fair after his meeting.” Probably. Maybe. Nothing was certain with Colin.
“After his meeting,” Aiden parroted.
Aiden was meeting his developmental milestones; Elm waited for each one, sure that at some point his being a clone would manifest itself in a limitation, or a severe deficiency. She treated him carefully, and he was growing up timid and fearful, dependent. But so far they’d been lucky. Sometimes Elm forgot he was Ronan’s clone; he seemed so himself, so Aiden.
Though Aiden looked just like his brother—his twin, really—with the long nose that Elm shared, Colin’s blond hair and gray eyes, there were differences between Ronan and Aiden. Elm wasn’t sure if this was some trick of memory or if Aiden really was taller than Ronan at this age (possible: foods were increasingly fortified; Elm was vigilant with his diet and had breast-fed him past one year). He was interested in music, which Ronan never was. And he was a ham, in the way of second children, forever competing for attention in a way that Ronan never had to.
Occasionally, during a late-night feeding, or for a moment in the bathtub, Aiden stared at her with Ronan’s eyes and his genetics reminded her of her enormous loss, the grief that could only be salved, never cured. Though she would never admit it, those were the times when she regretted what she’d done. They were infrequent, but devastating, and flashes of hatred for this impostor were as strong and as fleeting as the impromptu feelings of recognition and adoration that same gaze could inspire. She would have to live with these contradictions. Always.
But then he’d look up at her in such a way that it felt like Ronan was there, inside him, and when he began to talk it was as though Elm were getting to regain what she had lost. At those moments she didn’t care that she had sacrificed her career, her marriage, perhaps her happiness.
They stopped at the crosswalk near Phillips de Pury, and Elm strained to look for Colin’s niece. She was supposed to meet them at the auction house and take the children for the afternoon, but Mary was notoriously unreliable. Yesterday she was an hour late returning home, bringing the children back full of sugar, having missed Aiden’s nap. Elm couldn’t explain to her how worried even a tardiness of fifteen minutes made her without seeming overprotective, crazy.
“Mary!” Moira squealed. She broke from Elm’s hand and ran to hug her cousin. “Are we going to the carnival?”
“What carnival?” Mary feigned ignorance. “I thought we’d tour Buckingham Palace.”
“No!” Moira giggled.
“Mary!” Aiden said. He knew better than to wriggle from Elm’s grasp, but she could feel his urge to run to Mary. Elm was jealous; her arrival never provoked such fanfare.
“Hi, Mary,” Elm said. “Thanks for taking them.”
“No trouble,” Mary said. She was wearing a long skirt woven with shiny threads that sparkled, her many bracelets providing an accompanying tinkling.
“Why do I say yes to this thing?” asked a nearby man, echoing Elm’s thoughts. He was tall and thin, dark with a couple of days’ stubble that looked purposeful rather than neglectful.
A young woman shushed him. “They’ll hear you.”
“I don’t care.” His accent was foreign. Was this the man she was supposed to be interviewing—Marcel Connois’s great-great-grandson, himself some sort of artist? This was one of the auction house’s gimmicks in the great global market collapse, an added value, an enticement to come to an underattended auction: meet the artist’s descendant! What a change from three years ago, when people threw money at art as though they had it