“I’m so happy to see you again,” the nun replied in a soft Slavic accent.
They turned toward the Prado and watched Joy help the girl out. Zoe could hear the faint strains of “Fields of Gold” emanating from her headphones. Joy knelt in front of the girl and uncovered her ears, placing the headphones and iPod in the girl’s pocket.
“We’re here,” she said. “You’re going to like this place.” Taking the girl’s hand, she stood again and greeted Sister Anica. “She hasn’t spoken yet, but she’s quite fond of music.”
The nun smiled at the girl and nodded to the ladies from Social Welfare. “Come, this way,” she said, gesturing toward a pair of rosewood doors standing open to admit the breeze.
They followed Sister Anica down a hallway decorated with the drawings of children to a courtyard dominated by playground equipment and a majestic acacia thorn tree. There, Sister Anica introduced Zoe to a diminutive young nun with tropical blue eyes.
“Sister Irina will take you from here,” she said. “The rest of us have paperwork to finish.”
After Sister Anica departed with Joy and the social workers, Sister Irina knelt down before the girl. “I am Irina,” she said. “Can I be your friend?” The girl hung her head shyly, and the nun smiled. “That’s okay. We can talk about it later.”
She led them down a breezeway to a brightly painted room with an array of toys. Two children with Down syndrome sat by the wall, playing with dolls. An older child with cerebral palsy sat in a special chair by the window, listening to a story read by an elderly nun.
Zoe saw an electric piano on the floor beside a stuffed bear. She found the power switch and hit one of the keys. The piano began to play “Fur Elise.” A smile blossomed slowly on the girl’s face, and she made a sound reminiscent of air being released from a balloon. She touched one of the keys, then another. While she was occupied, Sister Irina took Zoe aside.
“This is very unusual for us,” she said. “All our children are orphans. If she has a family, we don’t want her to get too attached.”
“We’re doing our best to locate them,” Zoe assured her.
The nun looked toward the acacia tree, its limbs framed by the cobalt sky. “The things men do to children. Our rule teaches us to be merciful. But this … I tremble to say it, but I feel wrath. You must find the man who did this and put him in prison.”
Zoe met her eyes. “We’ll get him,” she promised.
After returning to the CILA office, Zoe spent the afternoon pretending to research a point of British evidentiary law on which the Zambian courts had yet to rule. In fact she was thoroughly preoccupied by her father’s email. She was trapped and she knew it. She could neither avoid a response nor deny his request—to do so would dissolve the goodwill she had succeeded in rebuilding when he and Sylvia had met her for dinner in South Africa at the end of her clerkship.
She sat by the window, pondering the contradictions in their relationship. Eleven years ago he had betrayed her with a kiss and she had run from him, until she realized she was a kite on a string, beholden to him still. Her charitable trust—a creation of her mother’s will—was not yet hers, and the man who managed it was her father’s puppet. Atticus Spelling, an octogenarian curmudgeon in New York, had vetoed many of her donations over the years, citing concerns about the fiscal discipline of the charities she favored. If not for her father’s intervention, Spelling would have withheld funding from half a dozen small nonprofits doing life-saving work in southern Africa, including Special Child Advocates and St. Francis. Zoe hated the subterfuge, but she was bound to it until her thirtieth birthday.
When five o’clock came, she finally sent an email accepting her father’s invitation. Then she left the office and climbed into her Land Rover, sitting for a moment before starting the engine. She watched the lavender jacaranda blooms dance in the wind and tried not to think about Friday night. After a while, she started the SUV and pulled into traffic, taking Independence Avenue toward Kabulonga.
When she arrived at her apartment complex, she greeted the guard at the gate and parked beside a hedge of bird of paradise. Entering her apartment, she threw her backpack on the couch and went to her bedroom to change into her swimsuit. The air was cool in the falling light, and the pool would be frigid, but she didn’t care. She had grown up swimming in the North Atlantic.