Chapter 2 - The AddressI know that street. I have walked past that street twice a week for six years, on my way to the good bakery, the one that does the seeded rolls Elsie liked. I had never once looked twice at the small blue house on the corner with the crooked mailbox, because I had no reason to.
Mr. Okonkwo, to his enormous credit, did not let me leave with her that day. He was kind about it, and firm about it, and I understood, even through the ringing in my ears, that he was right to be. He called the district safeguarding officer while I sat with Junie in the front office, and he called it in a voice pitched low enough that she couldn't quite hear the words, though children always hear more than we think.
What emerged over the following forty-eight hours, through a safeguarding officer named Priya Ramaswamy and, eventually, a family solicitor I hired within the hour of leaving that school, was this:
My husband, Callum, had a second daughter. Junie. She was born four months before Elsie's tenth birthday, to a woman named Delphine Voss, whom Callum had been seeing, on and off, for the better part of three years before Elsie died — an affair he never disclosed, a child he never acknowledged to me, a second life he had apparently managed to keep entirely separate from the one he shared with Elsie and me, right up until the moment our daughter got sick.
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Elsie was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia two months before her eleventh birthday. She died four months after that, in a hospital room I have not been able to walk past since. During those four months, according to what Delphine eventually told the safeguarding officer, Callum stopped visiting Junie almost entirely. He told Delphine he needed space. He sent money, sporadically, guiltily, the way people send money when they're trying to purchase distance from something rather than support it.
Then Elsie died, and something in Callum apparently broke in a direction none of us saw, because six months after our daughter's funeral, he started visiting Junie again. Regularly. Quietly. And, according to Delphine's own increasingly defensive statements to the safeguarding officer, he started asking Junie to call him things Elsie used to call him. He started buying her the same books. He enrolled her, using a temporary address he arranged through Delphine, at a school four hundred metres from the house he still shared with me — the same school, the exact same building, where Elsie had walked to and from since second grade.
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