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Siobhan sat in the waiting room next to Sarah, holding both their coats in her lap. Sarah was restless in the next chair, her arms wrapped around her own ribs and her fingers drumming on her opposite elbow. She picked her way through the magazines spread across the table in front of them, before giving up and surveying the room constantly, nervously.
They did't talk. Siobhan imagined herself a rock, an anchor keeping Sarah here, still, for once. She passed the time following the hushed argument carried on by the girl sitting across from them, chin buried in her own winter jacket as if to muffle whatever she was hissing into her cell phone. Siobhan idly sorted through the possibility of who she was arguing with: a friend, a boyfriend, her mother? Someone who cared, but not perhaps enough to sit here and wait with her.
Finally one of the clinic nurses called the name Manning. Sarah startled alert, took her boots down from where they had been propped up in front of her. "Yeah," she said hoarsely. "Yes. That's me." She didn't look at Siobhan.
The nurse's smile was kind. "Sarah?" She got another jerky nod. "If you'd come with me, dear." Looking at Siobhan: "Your mother can come too, if you'd like."
Sarah was on her feet. She looked back, forward, back again. "No, I mean, she's not..." she trailed off. Then she twitched her shoulders and straightened her spine. "It's fine." A final glance over her shoulder, then she went through the door beside the nurse's station. Alone.
Siobhan sat back down from where she'd half risen herself. It was fine. She'd talked Sarah through this, twice, and knew the girl understood her options, her rights. Siobhan had sat in waiting rooms just like this one, on both sides of the Atlantic, with all kinds of women who didn't have anyone else's hand to hold. She'd met the doctors who work here, trusted them with people more fragile than a lippy 16-year-old.
She'd thought, stupidly she'd thought she'd never have to sit here with a child of her own. But here she was. And Sarah, she'd raised Sarah to stand on her own. She didn't need anyone here to hold her hand, but Siobhan could do this one thing for her. Wait, and drive her home, and show her that this was one more thing she was strong enough to move forward from. She might not have a soft word for Sarah, but she hoped she'd see this for what it was, the closest Siobhan could come.
She's not my mother.
Siobhan had never wanted to be a mother. Never planned to have children of her own. It had been impossible to imagine a child as part of her life in Ireland. Later, in London, she had daily evidence that there were already too many children in the world whose own parents had failed them, enough mothers in need of help from someone without children of her own to mind. People she was better able to help without a child of her own to worry after.
And besides, she knew her own limits. She had never quite known how to make herself into a welcoming port for lost souls. People were always grateful for her brand of help, when they needed it, but grateful as they'd be for a cliff that kept the wind off a beach where they sheltered. They were just as grateful to move on as soon as they were able. That was all for the best: if she could set someone on their feet and make sure they had a weapon in their hand, that let her turn to the next person still struggling to their knees.
The safehouse did good work, fighting the fight even though in a different way than she'd done before. Most of the time she was happy with the work, even if her hands sometimes itched for the kind of work she'd done with a gun in her hands, before things got too warm and she had to bury herself in a London suburb.
From time to time, though, she knew herself to be restless. Usually when the other kind of guest came through, not mothers or children but men and women on their way further out under cover of darkness. Siobhan imagined going with them, getting in a car headed who knows where, onwards to a boat headed to nowhere. She imagined slipping back into a version of her old life, somewhere far away where she could be anonymous.
But whatever common cause she might find elsewhere, in her heart the struggle was here, and across the Irish Sea. She wasn't ready to go further from home than she already had. Heaven knew there was trouble enough in England to keep a watch on.
Siobhan never asked where the children came from, the children who came without mothers in the middle of the night. Nobody in the house ever asked. But their wary looks, and the veiled warnings from the man who brought them, Carlton, reminded Siobhan every time that the house could use someone watching to keep to wolves away.
Everyone who came through the safehouse needed to be hidden, but these children most of all. There were ways to hide them in other families: the youngest could be claimed as home births; older children were harder, but it could be done, when they could find someone willing. Someone who could be trusted.
They had always managed, before. But when Carlton arrived with another child, Sarah, there was nowhere for her to go.
For a fortnight they looked for someone to take her, someone they could trust, but every friendly hearth was full. Or at least without room for one of Carlton's children, with the kind of trouble they might one day bring.
Gillian, who ran the house, finally ran up against the limits of her network. Late at night, after the rest of the house was asleep, she sat up in the kitchen with Siobhan. "There's one other option," she said, refilling her glass from the bottle on the table.
Siobhan knows what she means: Siobhan Sadler is an unmarried woman from far enough away, with little enough medical history that would ever contradict that she had a child. They'd discussed it before. Rejected it before. But before there had always been a better candidate. There had always been a better person to take care of a child. Now there isn't.
She had considered the possibility herself, in the last week. The child, Sarah, was quiet enough, though mistrustful, and already as canny as any eight year old that had passed through the house. No bad thing, Siobhan considered: things would go easier if Sarah could keep her own secrets. Here, in the house, there was always someone else to help take care of a child--Siobhan wouldn't deny her own responsibility, but it was a comfort to know, all the same. She could provide a curtain to draw across Sarah's past.
And if Gillian was now asking, if there were no other options, Siobhan knew she would do it. So she did. Stepped up and took the child as her own. Promised to keep her safe, and didn't miss the shadow in Gillian's eyes when she said she hoped she could.
Years passed, and Siobhan relaxed somewhat into the unexpected role of guardian. Sarah--and later little Felix as well--became one of the fixtures of the house, small dark heads that stayed as other children and families passed through. Sarah remained watchful, guarded, but seemed to grow to trust the security of a single home, a place she wouldn't be forced to leave.
Then, when Sarah had been with her four years, a last desperate word came from Carlton. He was going to be arrested, he said. He'd been found, though he wouldn't say by whom. He'd been found, and the same people would be looking for Sarah. If she was to stay safe, she needed to be hidden, somewhere Carlton couldn't know to find her.
Looking out the window, Siobhan watched Sarah slouch up to the gate with Felix in tow, home from school. Safe for now, at least. She felt a sudden swell of protectiveness for them both. Goodness knew what was coming for Sarah, but she would keep her as safe as she knew how. She would protect them both, as well as she could, as long as she drew breath to do so. She would protect these children.
She considered the question of where to go for less than a day. She couldn't disappear into the wind and start anywhere in the world, not with two children in tow. The list of people she knew without any connection to the house, without any connection to Carlton, was short, and it only took a few phone calls to narrow it down to Brenda. She'd left Ireland with her young son, at much the same time Siobhan had and for much the same reason. Brenda would take her in, she knew, would help her get settled in a new place.
She had no answers for Sarah's questions about why they were leaving, did her best to teach her not to ask. It was better for her not to know. Sarah, in turn, raged against the lack of explanation for why they had to leave London, why she had to leave her school and all her friends. Felix, though, Felix didn't ask any questions, just accepted the news so solemnly. Siobhan felt badly for that, for tearing his world apart to keep another child safe. But she'd taken him in, just as she'd taken Sarah in, and there was never any path out but forward. She could only hope that both children would settle well enough in a new home, that they'd forgive her one day even if they never knew why she'd left.
Sarah never settled. She made the trip well enough, but the change seems to have uncovered a great well of anger in her, one that had been covered over before. She still demanded to know why they had left, and when Siobhan stayed silent she grew wilder. She made friends readily enough, but they were certainly no steadier than the friends she'd sneaked off to smoke with back in Brixton. By the time she was fourteen, Siobhan would have been happy to know they were sneaking off only to smoke. Every year that passed Sarah drew further into herself, looked at Siobhan with less trust.
Now, sitting in a clinic's waiting room, Siobhan wondered if she could have done anything different. She'd seen so many young women on the same course over the years, and from the outside it had always looked so avoidable, so easy to steer a daughter away from. But as ever, nothing was ever as simple from the inside.
Sarah was a strong girl. Siobhan had held to that truth since Sarah had first told her she was pregnant, had first refused to say who the father might be, as though Siobhan had never seen the too-much-older boy depositing Sarah at the curb of the house. Whatever foolish choices Sarah had made, Siobhan knew, had to believe that she'd raised a daughter strong enough to face this choice, and chart her own way forward. And she hoped, in the desperate way of mothers everywhere, that this would be the hardest choice Sarah would face.
For the next six weeks, Siobhan thought maybe she'd been lucky. Maybe Sarah had calmed down, would steady herself. She had reason to hope. Sarah was quiet at first, withdrawn, spent hours alone in her room, but she was also home most evenings, she met Siobhan's eye more often than not, she even said thank you without sarcasm. The house felt more relaxed than it had in years. A welcome change from the absent angry teenager Siobhan had grown accustomed to. Even Felix seemed happier, though even when Sarah wouldn't speak to Siobhan she'd always made time for her little brother.
Of course, it all ended. Siobhan wasn't sure what started it, thought it might have been something at school, something she had no control over and little knowledge of. Sarah started spending evenings out again. Started seeing the same boy Siobhan was almost sure had gotten her in trouble before.
Siobhan's attempts to talk to her fell on deaf ears. She knew as soon as she started that she came off too hard, too unyielding; eight years haven't taught her to gentle herself. Now every attempt is met with nothing but anger, every clumsy effort at reconciliation only pushes Sarah further away.
It was after Sarah graduated that everything went abruptly further downhill. She began to disappear not just for days, but for weeks or months. She never said where she had gone, not to Siobhan, and Felix hung onto every lesson of loyal silence he'd learned from them both through the years.
Siobhan wasn't blind, though, and besides that she had sworn to keep Sarah safe. So she kept her eyes open, and followed Sarah when she had to, and could say with some certainty what Sarah did to feed herself. She'd kept many secrets over the years, her own as well as other people's. She could keep it to herself that she knew about the petty thefts and small-scale grift. Could recognize, to herself, that he daughter had learned this at her knee: to be wary of strangers, and doubly wary of authority; a general policy of witholding information when possible, lying when necessary, and always watching to make sure that people are who they claim to be. Siobhan had learned these things herself so that she could fight for her principles, and that she taught to her children to keep them safe.
Sarah missed almost all of Felix's last year of high school. When she came back she wouldn't meet Siobhan's eye, but she asked if she could stay in her old room.
Two weeks later she told Siobhan she was pregnant, four months along. Said, a bit defiantly, that she was keeping it this time. Seemed disappointed when Siobhan just nodded and said she'd always wanted her to make her own decisions.
Before Kira was born, the best that Siobhan hoped for was that a child would give Sarah an anchor she'd never found elsewhere. That somehow, they would all find themselves in calm waters this time. Instead the reality of her daughter seemed to fill Sarah with nervous panic, almost enough to overwhelm her desperate love.
She lasted through to Kira's first birthday, staying under Siobhan's roof. Then she started staying away again, leaving Kira behind more often than not, but asking each time if Siobhan could watch her, as though it would only be for a few days.
The first time Siobhan saw a bruise on Sarah's cheek, Kira was four. She'd taken up with Vic, and moved out with Kira as though for good this time. But six months after leaving, she showed up with a bruise on her face, and asked if she and Kira could stay. Just a few nights, she said.
Siobhan knew when she let Sarah into the house that she'd leave again. Go back to Vic, who hit her. She'd seen it too many times, regular like the tide.
That night, after Sarah and Kira were both asleep, she sat up in her kitchen and for the first time in years contemplated killing a man. Sarah could look out for herself, Sarah had shown that she'd be fine almost whatever happened, but Kira... whatever mistakes Siobhan had made with Sarah, she could keep them from hurting Kira in turn. But killing Vic would involve the police, and Siobhan had kept Sarah safe for too many years to ruin it now by bringing her into a murder investigation.
But she'd be damned if she let Kira, who was still miraculously such a happy child, leave this house again.
Sarah might never forgive her for keeping Kira away from her, but Siobhan accepted years ago that in keeping people safe she might have to make them unhappy. Sarah made her own choices. Even if Siobhan could keep her safe from her past, she couldn't keep her safe from herself. But she could protect Kira, and she would.