Page 3 of Stolen

Kick.

‘Daddy’s dead,’ Lottie says, matter-of-factly.

The nuclear option. Golden princess curlsanda dead daddy? There’s no coming back from that.

‘Oh, dear. Oh. I’m so sorry, Charlotte.’

‘It’s OK. Mummy says he was a bastard.’

‘Lottie,’ I reprove, but my heart’s not in it. Hewas.

The woman subsides into her seat, radiating the peculiar combination of tongue-tied embarrassment and ghoulish curiosity with which I’ve become so familiar in the fourteen months since Luca was killed when a bridge collapsed in Genoa. He was visiting his elderly parents, who split their time between their apartment there and his mother’s ancestral family homein Sicily. It’s just luck it was my weekend to have Lottie, and not his, or she’d have been with him.

Taking pity on the woman, I give Lottie my mobile phone. It’s quite safe: at thirty thousand feet she can’t repeat the in-app purchase debacle of last month.

With my daughter distracted, I flip open my case file, trying to keep my paperwork in order in the cramped space.

This trip couldn’t have come at a worse time. The asylum hearing for one of my clients, a Yazidi woman who survived multiple rapes during her captivity by IS, was unexpectedly brought forward last week, meaning I’ve had to hand it over to one of my colleagues, James, the only lawyer at our firm with a free docket. He’s extremely competent, but my client is terrified of men, which will make it difficult for James to confer with her at her hearing.

The case should be open-and-shut, but I worry something will go wrong. If we weren’t going to the wedding of my best friend, Marc, I’d have cancelled the trip.

I’m midway through composing a detailed follow-up email to James when Lottie suddenly spills a full cup of Coke across my table.

‘Goddamn it, Lottie!’

I shake my papers furiously, watching rivulets of Coke streaming from the pages.

Lottie doesn’t apologise. Instead, she crosses her arms and glares at me.

‘Get up,’ I say sharply. ‘Come on,’ I add, as she mulishly remains in her seat. ‘You’ve got Coke all over yourself. It’ll be sticky when it dries.’

‘I want another one,’ Lottie says.

‘You’re not having another anything! Move it, Lottie. I’m not kidding around.’

She refuses to budge. I unbuckle her seatbelt and haul herout of her seat. She yowls as if I’ve really hurt her, attracting attention.

I know exactly what my fellow passengers are thinking. Before Lottie, I used to think it myself every time I saw a child have a meltdown in a supermarket aisle.

I hustle Lottie down the narrow aisle towards the bathroom. She responds by slapping the headrest of every seat as she passes. ‘Fuck you,’ she says cheerfully, with each slap. ‘Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.’

I stopped being embarrassed by my daughter’s bad behaviour long ago, but this is extreme, even for her. I grab her shoulders. ‘Stop that right now,’ I hiss in her ear. ‘I’m warning you.’

Lottie screams as if mortally wounded, and then collapses bonelessly in the aisle.

‘Oh my God,’ a woman sitting near us exclaims. ‘Is she all right?’

‘She’s fine.’ I bend down and shake my daughter. ‘Lottie, get up. You’re making a scene.’

‘She’s not moving,’ someone else cries. ‘I think she’s really hurt.’

The buzz of concern around us intensifies, and a few people half-stand in their seats. A steward hurries down the aisle towards us.

‘This woman hit her kid,’ a man accuses.

‘I didnothit her. She’s just having a tantrum.’

The steward looks from the man to me, and then at Lottie, who still hasn’t moved. ‘Does she need a doctor?’