Page 76 of Days You Were Mine

‘Yes,’ Hannah says, ‘we know about the garden, thank you. And I’m sorry, but I’m finding this information a little hard to get my head round. So just to be clear, Alice, your friend, our au pair, comes in here with our son, Samuel, but she says he is hers? She pretends, in fact, to be his mother?’

Stefano looks crestfallen and trapped in the face of Hannah’s cold interrogation.

‘I’m sorry.’ He shrugs. ‘I don’t know what else to say.’

Hannah shakes her head; she seems to have run out of words. She bends down to the buggy, where Samuel is sitting wide-eyed and oblivious. She puts her hand against his cheek, just for a second, a heartbreaking gesture that says just the one word: mine. Then she stalks out of the café.

A few doors down, beside the entrance to the new gym we both belong to and never attend, she slows to a stop, hands to her face, curved over the pushchair, weeping. It’s a good minute before she can speak, and when she does, she says not the thing I’m expecting – ‘How dare she? How. Bloody. Dare. She?’ – but something else.

‘Samuel thinks Alice is his mum.’

I’m so surprised, I almost laugh. Samuel is eight months old. His thoughts are centred on food and sleep; he doesn’t yet have the cognitive power to assess who is and who isn’t his actual mother. Or so I have been repeatedly told.

But Hannah’s outburst is far from over.

‘I should never have gone back to work, it was so selfish of me. I love him more than anything and yet I’ve allowed a complete stranger to look after him day after day just so I could carry on with my stupid career. When your mother, your actual mother, the woman who brought you up for the first eighteen years of your life, was generous enough to offer us financial support if I stayed at home to look after him like any normal, caring woman would, given the choice. And I’ve wanted to, oh you don’t know how much I’ve wanted to be with him, but I put my job first. And now this has happened and it’s all my fault.’

‘How could it possibly be your fault? Samuel is too youngto understand about things like that. He loves you. He knows you’re his mum.’

I’m trying to hold on to her, but she shoves me away.

‘You don’t get it, do you? You don’t understand what this is about.’

‘Yes I do. You’re worried that Samuel loves Alice more than you. And I’m telling you that’s crazy. Babies don’t have thoughts at this stage in their lives. They don’t remember one day to the next.’

‘How can you say that when you’re sofucked upabout the first months of your life?’

I step backwards, a physical defence; the wash of shock makes me cold and alert. I can hardly look at her, this woman I love.

Hannah starts crying again.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.’

Samuel, marooned and motionless in his pram, begins to wail, and Hannah wiggles the handle, distractedly, demonically.

‘We used to be so happy,’ she says.

‘We still are, aren’t we?’ I cannot stand any threat to my existence, surely she knows that. I’m an adoptee, I’m addicted to the status quo.

I watch as she bends down to take Samuel out of the pram, unclipping his straps, kissing his face. The minute he’s propped against her, he stops crying. Isn’t that proof enough?

‘See? See how he loves you? Shall we walk up to the common? We can talk as we go.’

Hannah looks at me now, her focus absolute.

‘I really hope you fully comprehend what just happened,’ she says, and there is a coldness to her voice I don’t like. ‘Alice needs to go. Alice needs to be sacked or whatever it is you do when it turns out that yourbirth mother’ – nasty, hostile emphasis of the words – ‘has been stealing your son.’

‘Hardly stealing, H. But she’s definitely weird around him. I tried to tell you.’

‘Why didn’t I listen to you? Why didn’t I see it? What kind of woman pretends another woman’s child is her baby?’

‘And dressing him up in my old clothes. The whole thing is strange. She seems to have zero interest in me, her actual son; her entire focus is on him.’

‘Do you think she’s dangerous?’

‘Of course not.’

I’m relieved Hannah has finally come around to my way of thinking, but she’s making leaps here that are bordering on the extreme.

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