I mean, it’s not fair what people think – that she’s stupid, or retarded, or slow. Special baby, we used to say. Special, as in different. Maman doesn’t like us to be different – but Rosette just is, and is that so bad?

Thierry talks about getting help for her. Therapy, speech coaching and all kinds of specialists – as if there might be a cure for being special that a specialist would be bound to know.

But there’s no cure for being different. Zozie’s taught me that already. And how could Roux be Rosette’s dad? I mean, he’s never seen her before. Didn’t even know her name—

‘He can’t be Rosette’s dad,’ I said, although by then I wasn’t sure.

‘Well, who else could it be?’ she said.

‘I don’t know. Not Roux, that’s all.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because he’d have stayed with us, that’s why. He wouldn’t have let us go away.’

‘Well, maybe he didn’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe your mother never told him. After all, she never told you.’

I started to cry then. Stupid, I know. I hate it when I have to cry, but I couldn’t make it stop, somehow. It was like an explosion inside of me, and I couldn’t work out if I hated Roux now, or whether I loved him even more—

‘Shhh. Nanou.’ Zozie put her arms around me. ‘It’s OK.’

I put my face into her shoulder. She was wearing a big old chunky sweater, and the cable knit pressed into my cheek hard enough to leave marks. It isn’t OK, I wanted to tell her. That’s just what adults always say when they don’t want kids to know the truth; and most of the time it’s a lie, Zozie.

Adults always seem to lie.

I gave a great big shuddery sob. How can Roux be Rosette’s dad? She doesn’t even know him. She doesn’t know that he takes his hot chocolate black, with rum and brown sugar. She hasn’t seen him make a fish-trap out of willow, or a flute out of a length of bamboo, or know that he hears the call of every bird on the river and can copy them so that even the birds can’t tell the difference—

He’s her father, and she doesn’t even know.

It’s not fair. It should have been me—