from Prologue

We went next door to Picardy's. The restaurant was crowded but we found a table in a corner behind a large potted fern. Mother settled Sunny. She didn't need much settling; she was sound asleep.

"You stay here with the baby, Violet, and I'll go up to the counter to choose our treats."

I was having none of that. I wanted to pick my own. She sighed and gave in to me. My mother wasn't much of a fighter.

There was chocolate cake and rhubarb pie and banana cream pudding and apricot tarts. I finally chose the chocolate cake. Mother added it to her bowl of pudding already on the tray. Sunny was too young for treats. Her needs were pretty basic, mostly involving milk.

I followed along behind my mother as she carried our tray back to the table. When it clattered to the ground every face in the room turned toward us. Moon-faced women and chisel-faced men and rosy-cheeked waitresses and busboys wearing hairnets. My mother scrabbled through the carriage and raced about the restaurant from table to table.

"Sunny!" she cried out. "My baby!"

The carriage looked the way it always did when Sunny wasn't in it. There was a soft dent in the pillow where her head had been. I touched it. It was warm.

My mum clutched at her throat where there was nothing but the flimsy collar of her summer dress.

"Help!" She didn't make a sound but we all saw the word leave her mouth.

A man in a dark suit took charge. He phoned the police from the restaurant phone on the wall next to the cash register. That frightened my mother even more. Surely it was too soon for those kinds of measures, she said. He tried to calm her and told everyone not to touch anything. Everything he said seemed to crank up my mum's terror a notch. I wondered if I should admit to having touched Sunny's pillow but I decided to keep it to myself.

"Maybe Will's got her," my mother said in an odd loud voice. "Maybe my husband slipped in and picked her up."

A waitress ran next door for my dad. We were well known at the restaurant: that nice lawyer's family.

My mother ran out to the street; the man who kept scaring her ran out too and women fussed over me. I stayed with the carriage, guarding it like I should have been doing all along. I placed my hands in the pockets of my dress to keep from touching anything and stared at my cake on the floor.

I don't think I considered that I would never see Sunny again or that my life would change drastically from that moment in time.