Which was why she didn’t mind that Cheryl didn’t do things exactly the way she asked her to do them. It was why she didn’t mind that Cheryl kept giving Bunny a bottle when every morning Nancy put out his red sippy cup next to the schedule she’d written out for the day for Cheryl to follow. Or that Cheryl put cereal in Bunny’s bottle with his formula. Or that she had the TV on sometimes when Nancy came home in the evening. It was why she turned a blind eye when Cheryl took their best teaspoons to the park to give Bunny his banana instead of the plastic ones that were always left out on the counter next to the fruit bowl in the morning. It was why she voiced no objection when Cheryl purchased Bunny a hideous silky emerald-green sport-shirt with her own money and sometimes dressed him in it instead of in one of the little pastel polo shirts which lay washed and ironed and folded and stacked in two neat piles by Cheryl herself in Bunny’s closet in accordance with Nancy’s instructions.

Any time Nancy felt herself getting annoyed by any of these things, she told herself that they were not important, not in the great scheme of things. Bunny was happy, Bunny was safe. With all her heart she felt sure of that; that Cheryl would never, ever let any harm come to Bunny, or do anything to make him sad. Cheryl was stubborn about small things, like the spoons and not using the sippy cup; stubborn about doing things her own way, and her English wasn’t great and probably she didn’t talk to him enough, not as much as you were supposed to talk to a one-year-old, but she was vigilant and careful and very gentle, just like Iceline had been, and when Nancy pictured the future, nothing about it felt to her in any way precarious and Cheryl, in her thin washed-out T-shirts and her bright skirts, was always in it.

Bunny was already sleeping, that last Monday when Nancy arrived home. He lay draped and stretched out like a starfish high up on Cheryl’s mountainous shoulder. He was newly-bathed and in his clean pyjamas with his fair hair smartly parted on one side the way it always was when Nancy walked in the door. Cheryl lifted him gently off her shoulder and placed him in Nancy’s outstretched arms and then, in her slow imperfect English, she asked if Bunny could go home with her that night and sleep over with her. She’d bring him back in the morning.

Nancy was floored.

She’d never dreamed of Cheryl asking for such a thing.

Bunny, not be here? with them? for a whole night?