Reaching out, I took the packet of biscuits and dropped it in the shopping basket. It was surprisingly easy and felt good. Next to me another immigrant was bent down, inspecting the selection on the bottom shelf, but I stood tall and straight like the dog park woman. For a fleeting moment, I was almost a local, a person who didn’t have to crouch in front of the cheaper products on the lower shelf. I calculated it in my head: the price of that feeling was about a euro. That was how much I was willing to pay for a few seconds of feeling like I was Väinö’s mother. I left the package in my basket. Next to it a bag of semolina thudded down.

“I want to make Aino semolina pudding,” Daria said.

“She may not like it.”

“We’ll try. It was one of my favorites when I was little, and children like to make food with their parents. What else might Aino want?”

I smiled indulgently at Daria’s silly plans.

“Ice cream?”

Daria headed toward the freezers.

“What do you think? Will these do?”

A proper meal had done Daria good, as had the new clothes. She had accepted the vitamins I’d purchased her. She still wouldn’t talk about the man who had left her, but even so, this was a promising start, and Daria was following my directions. If my plan succeeded, the dog park family would be able to keep everything they had, their life in which they didn’t have to kowtow to anyone even when they were grocery shopping. Next week Väinö would come to this same supermarket with his parents. His father would push the loaded cart, and his mother would select a snack cracker packet from this same shelf. None of them would have any inkling of the disaster they had just avoided because I had saved their paradise and their son’s childhood. I would be his secret fairy godmother.

“One of our doctors moved to Finland to work,” I said. “He could examine you. We can go to him together. Right now.”

“I’ve had enough of white coats.”

“That’s what clients always say when they come to us, and some of them were genuinely desperate cases, some over sixty years old. Just think, you’re only—”

“Chocolate, or something else?” Daria asked, marching toward the candy aisle.

I would have taken the offer immediately, if I had been Daria. But I wasn’t. Still I intended to try my best. Sometimes the tiniest crack was enough. If she became convinced that I could get her pregnant, she would do anything for that, and then she’d be ready to pay the price I asked in return: a confession. I just had to ignite the spark and blow on it.

I followed Daria, who was assembling a new selection of delicacies. She didn’t even glance at the cheaper stacks of chocolate bars on the bottom shelf. At the checkout counters, the workers were reading bar codes at Friday evening speeds. The constant beeping hurt my head. On the other side of a shelf, a toddler, who should have been asleep already, was crying. But I let Daria do what she wanted and didn’t rush her.

“You’re going to be a great mother,” I said.

Daria smiled a smile that people would have been willing to pay to see. After I got the confession out of her, I would do what I had to, taking her money and her credit cards, and leaving her to rot in my apartment. She would never threaten my child’s life again. That was all I would ever be able to give my son.