The judge looked at the bailiff and said, “I’d like that child brought in, please, with the family liaison.”
Garrick took hold of the edge of the table and his knuckles went white.
The doors at the back opened.
And a six-year-old came in in a yellow cardigan holding a rabbit that has had one ear sewn back on twice.
I made a noise I have never made in public before.
It was June.
PART 2 — THE CANDLES
June is Garrick’s daughter from his first marriage. She is six. She lives with her mother and she has been at our house every other weekend since she was two.
I have been her stepmother for four years. She calls me Tam.
She was at the last two scans. She has an ultrasound picture stuck to her wall at her mother’s with sellotape that has gone yellow.
In the November we did her sixth at our house. About twenty-five people.
I made the cake myself, badly, because she had asked for a rabbit and I am not a person who can make a rabbit, and it came out looking like a grey dog.
I was carrying it in with the candles lit.
And Adrienne took it out of my hands.
She was already at that house by then. She was introduced as a work friend and she had been at three family things that autumn and I had said nothing, because I was four months gone and frightened and I had decided to be a person who did not make scenes.
She lifted that cake out of my hands and carried it the last four feet to the table herself.
And she said, to twenty-five people:
“Give me that. You’re not her mother, Tamsin. Sit down and let the family do it.”
Somebody laughed. Garrick’s brother, I think.
The room went back to normal in about two seconds and everybody sang.
Twenty-five people. My own sister four feet away. Garrick’s mother.
Nobody said one word.
And I sat down, eight feet from a cake I had made, and sang along with everybody else.
