My ex-husband invited the former wife he believed was still childless and miserable to his family’s Christmas at their military estate. He never imagined I would arrive on a government tactical helicopter — with four eight-year-olds who had his face.

I want that on the page plainly, because everything that happened on Christmas Day came out of those four seconds — and in those four seconds I was not thinking about my children at all.

I was thinking about a man’s face.

I did not think about my children for another eleven days. Not in connection with any of it.

They came into it on the Thursday, when I sat down with a chart and started working out logistics.

By then the shape of the thing was already set. It had been set since that window.

And the shape of it had four eight-year-olds standing in the middle of it, and I slotted them in the way you slot in any other element of a plan.
PART 2

Christmas morning came up cold and pale.

The authorised flight lifted at about seven and we went north over snow for two hours with the engines going steady.