‘Hey, we said no tears. Remember?’ She brushed Callum’s fingers away from his eyes, the morning she left.
‘Mummy will be home before you know it! And we can talk all the time – any time you’re missing me, you just ask Daddy to call me on WhatsApp, OK? That way the call will be free.’
Or, rather, this way no one would notice the absence of a foreign ringtone.
Her daughter gave her a broken smile.
‘I’m sorry,’ Gabriela told her, though she hadn’t intended to use those words, dangerously interlaced as they were with so many things she couldn’t say. ‘I’m going to call you every day, OK?’
‘I want you to take Otto.’ Callum shifted forward, proffering his stuffed rabbit, the one he had slept with in his bed pretty much every night since he was born.
She felt a fist in her stomach. ‘I can’t take Otto, he’s your—’
‘I want you to take him, to keep you warm. Joseph says it’s so cold in Russia that they have polar bears.’
She laughed, her voice cracking in her throat. ‘Well, you can tell Joseph there are no polar bears in Moscow – certainly not in April – but if you can spare him, I would adore to take Otto with me.’
‘It’ll be a brilliant adventure for him,’ Tom said, ruffling their son’s head. It was the first time he had spoken for a while and when she looked at him, she pretended not to detect the strain in his features. Tom had been hurt when she refused his offer for the three of them to see her off at the airport. It would be too hard, she told him; too emotional, for everyone. And he had nodded along, as if he had believed it was that simple.
She didn’t look back after she closed the front door. Even when she felt her children’s eyes following her down the street through the slatted blinds in the living room, their stares urging her to turn, to give them a final wave; to give them the reassurance they so badly needed.
Instead, she kept her attention fixed on the pavement in front of her as she moved towards the cab, the wheels of her suitcase catching against chinks in the concrete, busying herself with the mechanism of the passenger door, and finally her seat belt. The clicking sound was the doors of a prison cell locking behind her.
It was only once the car had turned the corner that she let her head fall back, and the tears burn down her cheeks, saliva catching in her throat.