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cat shape she’d bought a few days previously, trying to ignore the fact that the girls sat with their arms crossed, glaring at her?). Monica hadn’t been able to find a clean oven glove (because she had burned through yet another one on that blasted range) and the elder girl, Jessica, had slid from her chair, gone to a drawer in the dresser, pulled out a clean one and handed it to her without a word.
    “You know your way around this place better than I do, don’t you?” Monica had said, forcing a smile.
    Jessica had fixed her with a long, steady look. “We’ve lived here all our lives,” she’d said. “Florence was born right there”—she pointed to her left—“on the floor. Mummy swore
a lot
. Daddy was allowed to cut the cord.”
    Monica was frozen, a limp dough-cat spread out over her fingers, unable to look away from the floorboards by the window. She hadn’t been able to tread on them since.
    She tried with Peter’s daughters. She tried very hard. The weekdays—which they spent with their mother—took on a distinct rhythm for her. Monday, the day of their departure, was consumed by shock, her head enveloped in a black cloud of panic and uselessness, Tuesday in recuperation, Wednesday in gloom and despair: Florence and Jessica hated her. They hated her, no matter what Peter said. She could see it in their eyes, in the way they wheeled away from her if she happened to come near, like startled horses. The whole situation was untenable, a disaster, she would never make an adequate stepmother, let alone a good one. Thursday, she woke early and gave herself a talking-to: she was good with children, she’d practically raised Aoife and she wasn’t exactly what you’d call easy—how hard could it be to win over Peter’s two? Friday was spent in elaborate preparation: Monica bought coloring books, paint boxes, French-knittingdolls, soft balls of yarn. She put a vase of flowers on each of their bedside tables. She laid out flower presses, nature books, comics, glue, modeling clay, bright embroidery threads on the coffee table: she could teach them to embroider, to sew! They would make Christmas presents together—glasses’ cases, shoe shiners, pajama bags, monogrammed handkerchiefs. She pictured Peter finding the three of them huddled together on the sofa, sewing a surprise tobacco-tin cover for him. How happy it would make him, to know she had triumphed, she had won them over.
    Then Friday evening rolled around and she’d be confronted by the sight of two children in those matching corduroy smocks from mail-order kits, the hems of which were always slightly uneven—how Monica longed to unpick the seams and resew them properly; it would be the work of minutes—streaming through the house, looking for the pet they loved.
    Jenny, their mother, had been quick to ensure Peter took custody of the cat when they separated, insisting the creature remained in residence with him. And it didn’t take Monica long to work out why. The animal simply had no sense of what it could and couldn’t eat: it would consume bits of paper, elastic bands, lengths of string, the labels in clothing. She had never known anything like it. If foxes slit open the rubbish bags in the lane, the cat would snack on old bones, half-rotted fish heads, moldy crusts, chewed shards of yogurt pots, old shoelaces. And then it would come inside, yowling deafeningly at the back door until Monica gave in, and regurgitate the ill-thought contents of its stomach on the carpet, the newly polished floorboards, the kilim in the hall, the kitchen table.
    As Monica had told Peter the other day, if she had to scrub cat vomit off the furniture one more time, she would scream.
    Today was the day for its grooming—Thursday, the day she liked to clean the house, to erase all traces of the girls, to put things to rights, to remove all bits of leaves and grit from the cat’spelt. But the odd thing was that she couldn’t find it. She called its name, at the