“I want to ride the twain, Daddy.” Her face is pressed into my neck and her voice is sleepy.

“Tomorrow,” I tell her. “We’ll send Doll off to visit friends, and we’ll do lots of gross things.”

“All wight,” she sighs, “but Mommy doesn’t like me to do…” and then her voice drops off and she’s asleep. My heart beats and aches and beats and aches.

I spend the next week alone with my daughter. My mother visits friends and relatives, giving us plenty of time to bond and do our own thing. I take her to the zoo and the park and the museum, and upon her request, we eat sushi every day for lunch. I talk her into spaghetti one night for dinner, and she has a meltdown when she drops the noodles on her clothes. She wails, her face turning as red as her hair, until I put her in a bath and feed her the rest of her dinner sitting on the edge of the tub. I don’t know whether to be amused or mortified. When I get her out of the bath, she rubs her eyes, yawns and falls asleep right as I get pajamas on. I’m convinced she’s half angel. The half that isn’t Leah, of course.

We stop by my father’s house one evening. He lives in Cambridge in an impressive farmhouse with stables out back. He carries Estella from stall to stall where he introduces her to the horses. She repeats their names: Sugarcup, Nerphelia, Adonis, Stokey. I watch him charm my daughter and feel grateful that she’s a continent away from him. This is what he does. He gets right down on your level — whoever you are — and shines his attention on you. If you like to travel, he’ll ask where you’ve been, he’ll listen with his eyes narrowed and laugh at all your jokes. If you’re interested in model cars, he will ask your opinion on building them and make plans to have you teach him. He makes you feel like you’re the only person worth having a conversation with, and then he goes a year without having a conversation with you. The disappointment is vast. He will never build that model car with you, he will cancel dinner plans and birthday plans and vacation plans. He will choose work and someone else over you. He will break your charmed, hopeful heart time and time again. But, I’ll let my daughter have today, and I’ll protect her the best I can in the tomorrow. Broken people give broken love. And we are all a little broken. You just have to forgive and sew up the wounds love delivers, and move on.

We go from the stables to the kitchen where he makes a show of making us huge ice cream sundaes, and then squirts whipped cream into Estella’s mouth right from the can. She announces that she can’t wait to tell Mommy about this new treat, and I’m fairly certain my ex-wife will be shooting me nasty emails in the coming weeks. She loves him. Like I did. It’s heartbreaking to watch what kind of dad he could have been had he tried. The last two days of her visit, I feel sick to my stomach. I don’t want her to go. I want to be able to see her every day. In a year she will start pre-K. Then kindergarten and first grade. How will we wing weeklong visits to the UK then? It’ll all work itself out, I tell myself. Even if I have to bribe Leah to move to London.

Estella cries when we part at the airport. She’s clutching the llama to her chest, her tears dripping into its fur, begging me to let her stay in “Wondon.” I grind my teeth together and hate every decision I’ve ever made. God. What am I even letting her go back to? Leah is a vicious, conniving bitch. She left her at a daycare to get drunk when she was a week old for God’s sake. She kept her away from her father just to hurt me. Her love is conditional and so is her kindness, and I don’t want her anger to touch my daughter.

“Mum,” I say. I look into my mother’s eyes, and she gets it. She grabs my hand and squeezes.

“I pick her up from school twice a week, and I have her on weekends. I’ll make sure she’s okay until you have her back with you.”

I nod, unable to say anything else. Estella sobs into my neck, and the pain I feel is too complex to put into words.

“I’m going to pack up and come home,” I say to my mother over my daughter’s shoulder. “I can’t do this. It’s too hard.”

She laughs. “Being a daddy suits you. You have to finish out your contract with them. Until then, I’ll keep bringing her to see you.”

My mother has to pick her up and carry her through security. I want to jump past the barriers and snatch her back.

I’m so f**king depressed on the tube ride home; I sit with my head in my hands for most of it. I drink myself into a stupor that night and write an email to Olivia that I never send. Then I pass out and dream that Leah takes Estella to Asia and says she’s never coming back.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Since the court appointed all my custody dates with Estella, I get to have her with me every other Christmas — which makes it this Christmas. It’ll be my first Christmas with my daughter. Leah called me seething when our court-appointed mediator gave her the news.

“Christmas is important to me,” she said. “This is wrong. A child should never be away from her mother on Christmas.”

“A child should never be away from her father on Christmas either,” I shot back. “But you made sure that happened for two years.”

“This is your fault for moving away. I shouldn’t have to pay for your asinine decisions.”

She was right to a degree. I didn’t have anything for her, so I told her I had to go and hung up.

Christmas isn’t important to Leah. She doesn’t value family or tradition. She values being able to put our daughter in a Christmas dress and carting her to the numerous Christmas parties she attends. All the wealthy mothers do that. Tis the season to show off your children and drink low-fat, liquored-up eggnog.

I go shopping for her presents the day I find out I’m getting her for Christmas. Sara goes with me for reference. We’ve had drinks a couple times and I land up telling her everything about Olivia, Leah and Estella, so when I ask her to come shopping with me, she jumps at it.

“So, no dolls,” she says, holding up a Barbie. I shake my head.

“Her mother buys her dolls. She has too many.”

“What about art supplies? Nurture the inner artiste.”

I nod. “Perfect, her mother hates her to be dirty.”

We head over to the art aisle. She dumps play dough, paints, an easel and crayons into the cart.

“So, any word about Olivia?”

“Can you not?”