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I hobbled down the corridor to the NICU. It was slow going. Irina had done everything right, the doctors said, but it took a little work to stitch me up after what she’d done with her scissors. They had removed glass from my scalp and put a couple of stitches in my hand too. An accident, I’d told Pete. Fainted from the pain, and my head hit the glass door. I wasn’t sure if he believed this, but he didn’t ask any more questions for now.

In the NICU, my baby, one day old, lay in a Perspex tank under a jaundice lamp, with tubes coming out of her mouth and nose and wires attached all over her. As well as jaundice, she had underdeveloped lungs. A nurse wearing reindeer antlers approached me: it was Christmas Eve. “Just sit down in the rocker there, and I’ll bring her to you.” I brought the baby to my chest, under my hospital gown, so we were skin to skin. But holding her didn’t feel the same, with all the tubes and wires attached. And she didn’t have the wonderful smell that Stella had had. She just smelled salty and fishy. All she did was sleep, so after a while, I gave her back to the nurse.

Pete was on his way with Stella so she could meet her little sister, and I was nervous about how she’d react. To be precise, I was nervous about how Blanka-in-Stella would react. Blanka was accustomed to getting all of my attention. She might not respond well to this new arrival, who kept me in hospital when I could be helping her. I was grateful that only Pete and I were allowed into the NICU. For now, Stella was only allowed to look at her little sister.

I met Pete and Stella at the entrance to the NICU. I hugged Stella, but couldn’t read her expression. I led her up to the NICU’s viewing window and showed her which baby was ours. Just at that moment, the baby opened her eyes, and her fists clenched and unclenched. She had an expression on her face like someone trying to remember a dream.

Stella smiled to herself, and I felt a rush of relief. Blanka was great with little ones. I didn’t need to worry. Stella would put this baby at ease, the way Blanka had put Stella at ease when they first met.

I wanted to ask, “Who is this person you hate so much?” But that wasn’t how this worked: Blanka was here, inside Stella, but she was still herself. She didn’t offer up information or answer direct questions.

We left the baby to sleep and returned to my room. Stella pulled out her crochet project, a complicated-looking blanket with tassels and a hexagon pattern. She had been good as soon as she started—but of course, that was Blanka too. I shrank from the blanket.

A nurse brought us champagne and tea and scones. Pete had put me in the nicest maternity hospital money could buy. It was a forty-minute Tube journey from our house, but the room had a view over Regent’s Park.

“What do you think about Luna for a name?” Pete said. I forced myself to focus on him. He looked so well-groomed and manly in the maternity ward, a place of nurses and disheveled mothers, almost like a handsome doctor in the soap I’d watched with Maureen.

Stella and Luna, star and moon. It was a bit too cute, but Luna was a pretty name, and I had no energy to think of alternatives. My stitches stung and itched. My hand throbbed. “Fine,” I said. I wondered if he had his tattoo planned already.

Pete poured the champagne. But I didn’t feel like celebrating. Before I got pregnant, I’d worried about miscarrying, about losing the baby, but I never dreamed that it was Stella I would lose. She took the clotted cream and all the scones and went into the en suite bathroom—a perk of private maternity care—and shut the door.

“I need to talk to you about her,” I said.

“Don’t worry, Christmas is under control,” said Pete. “The hospital will probably give you a Michelin-starred lunch tomorrow, and Stella and I will make do. I was up late wrapping presents last night.”

The previous Christmas, Stella had put her hands over her ears and screamed when anyone pulled a Christmas cracker. But when Edith asked her if she “still” believed in Father Christmas, Stella shot back that obviously quantum physics explained Father Christmas: it was no problem for him to deliver millions of presents in twenty-four hours because he was a particle that could be in several places at once.

Suddenly I sat up. “Pete, how long has she been in the bathroom?”

He was about to nod off in the visitor’s armchair, but I seized his arm, my heart banging: Blanka could be doing anything to Stella in there. She could be gobbling my painkillers. Blanka had shown me she would hurt Stella if necessary.

“Get her out of there!” I shoved my tray table aside and heaved myself out of bed.

“Jesus, Charlotte. Calm down. She doesn’t like me going into the bathroom when she’s in there anymore. She’s growing up.” Pete knocked. “Stella, honey, you OK in there?” The lock clicked, and Stella’s head appeared around the door.

“I’m having a picnic.” The door closed again.

Pete stared at me. “She’s just eating scones. You scared the hell out of me, screaming like that. What did you think was happening in there?”

I sank back onto the pillows. “You have to watch her, Pete, when I’m not with you. Will you promise me? Don’t leave her in the bath alone. Don’t let her near anything sharp, any medicines.”

Pete frowned. “She’s not going to hurt herself.”

“She’s capable of anything. She’s very angry.”

“She just ate three scones. She can’t be that angry.”

“Don’t joke about it! I know she’s angry because she showed me her diary. It was right before I had the baby—Luna—at Irina’s. Stella knew where you’d hidden it. She gave me permission to read it. And all it says is ‘I hate that person I hate that person I hate that person I hate—’?”

“I get the message. So she uses her diary as a way to vent. That actually sounds pretty healthy.”

“How can you say that?”

“I know you think she’s a genius, but she’s eight years old. I don’t think we need to freak out because her diary isn’t great literature.”

“Just look at it.” I reached for my phone. Pete shook his head, but I shoved the photo under his nose. “Look at it. It’s in Armenian. It is not normal for an eight-year-old to write in Armenian. She would have had to learn an entirely new alphabet.”

“She can use Google Translate same as you. I expect she was just messing around.”

“Armenian was Blanka’s first language,” I hissed. “That’s not all. This is Blanka’s handwriting too. I compared it with an old shopping list Blanka wrote—”

“An old shopping list? Sweetheart, you’re frightening me. Let’s talk about this again after you’ve had a rest. I’m going to get them to check your temperature. Meanwhile, I promise you Stella’s safe with me.” He kissed me goodbye and had Stella do so too. Outside, I heard him murmuring to the nurse.

···

I thought I’d be alone on Christmas Day, but Pete’s colleague Kia showed up in the morning. I was touched. Emmy had sent me a text with a flurry of emojis, and Cherie had messaged a Congratulations! with no emojis. Kia was the only one to visit; she’d brought a huge hamper and a pink orchid too. I was surprised: I liked her well enough, but she didn’t seem the type to visit a colleague’s wife in hospital, especially not postpartum. She’d once laughingly told me she hated baby showers. At one, a friend had handed her a fancy journal and asked her to write a special note to welcome the baby. Other guests had jotted life lessons or gushed about the expectant mama, but Kia stood there paralyzed. “In the end, all I could do was write, ‘Welcome, Baby!’ in really big letters and get the hell out of there.”

“I know babies aren’t your thing,” I said now, touched. “Thank you for coming. Don’t you have Christmas plans?”

Kia smiled. “Well, I couldn’t make it home to the States, so I’ll have dinner with friends later. I thought I’d stop by and congratulate you first. Pete said the pregnancy was rough and you felt sick the whole way through. He feels bad he has to work so hard.”

“It’s so thoughtful of you to visit.” It was. But I felt uneasy. It wasn’t that Pete had confided in a work colleague about my pregnancy woes. I understood he needed a shoulder to lean on. It was the way she seemed to be defending Pete: working so hard, feeling so guilty.

But maybe I was reading too much into it. Something about Kia made me think she was lonely too. We both needed a friend. So I smiled, even though the gift hamper contained something called a jade roller for tired eyes and aromatherapy bath oils. Kia was childless, so it wasn’t her fault that she didn’t know my future as a mother of a newborn and a young child did not include long soaks while treating my unsightly under-eye bags.

Kia flopped into the chair next to my bed, cheeks flushed from the cold. She had a nose stud and the right sort of perky nose for it. “God, the birth sounded so dramatic. I mean, traumatic. Well, both, I guess.” She took my hand. “Charlotte, you are so fucking brave.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Though I didn’t really have any choice.”

“Can I see her?” Kia asked.

“You don’t have to, honestly.” I smiled. “I’ll tell her, ‘Welcome, Baby!’ from you.”

Kia grinned. “I’ll never live that down. Seriously, I’d love to see her.”

I put on my dressing gown and shuffled to the NICU, where I pointed out Luna through the viewing window. “So cute!” breathed Kia. “I wish I could hold her. I love the smell of babies.”

“She smells like the birth canal,” I said. I felt tired and ancient. “Like my vagina,” I clarified.

Kia laughed. She pointed at a nurse, gently joggling a baby, its head against her chest. “Oh look, the snuggle hold.”

“I didn’t know that position had a name,” I said.

“There are five ways to hold a newborn,” Kia said. “I studied up on YouTube before I came.”

And she’d made the trip here on Christmas Day. “Listen, really and truly, thank you for the gift hamper and the visit.”

“No problem.” Kia smiled at me, and I smiled back, although early on in “Charlotte Says,” I’d written, “When you say, ‘No problem,’ in response to being thanked, you suggest that there could well have been a problem and it’s lucky there wasn’t. For a more positive vibe, just say, ‘You’re welcome.’?”

After Kia had gone, I went back to the NICU and I held Luna. She was still curled into herself, asleep nearly all the time. No matter how hard I tried to feel the sweetness at the heart of it all, I still felt like I was holding an ordinary baby.

I called Pete to wish him Happy Christmas, and he said he felt bad I had to spend Christmas Day alone. “I want to make it up to you. I want to take you out for lunch tomorrow. I’ll make a reservation somewhere really nice—”

“Pete, I just gave birth. I’ll fall asleep halfway through the appetizers.”

“I didn’t mean that kind of place. I meant somewhere comfortable, where we can just sit by the fire. That’s what I really want: just the two of us, no distraction. We’ve become so disconnected.” His voice was wistful.

“You’re right,” I agreed, hope warming my chest. “I blindsided you yesterday when I told you about the diary. It wasn’t a good time to explain, with Stella right there. Don’t say anything now: I want you to hear me out properly. A quiet place, with good food. That’s what we need. A chance to talk.”

“We’re going to figure this out,” Pete said. “We’re a team.”

“And you know what, you could ask Kia to watch Stella,” I said. I didn’t think I could ask Irina, after she’d done so much.

Pete thought that was a great idea, and I felt hopeful. Time alone, away from her, was a rare opportunity. If we were together, really focused on each other for a few hours, I believed I could make him understand what was going on.