Free The Accidental Mother by Rowan Coleman Page A

emergency,” Sophie said. She was disappointed at her mum’s reluctance, even though she knew that prying her away from her dogs was near impossible, especially in recent years.
    “Please, Mum,” Sophie said, resenting that she had to ask for help twice. “I need you.”
    “All right,” her mother said, with slow reluctance. “But I won’t be able to stay for long, okay? Mitzy’s expecting, you know—it could be any minute.”
    Sophie said good-bye and looked at her reflection in her dressing table mirror. She looked exactly the same as she always did. Neat and efficient. Calm and in control—so why did she feel as if she’d suddenly been sent into a war zone, thrown in among the bloody chaos without the faintest clue what to do, not even any basic training? She made herself take a deep breath. Managing children was no different than managing any other project. It simply required a broad depth of knowledge, a cool head, and brilliant negotiating skills. That and twenty-four tranquilizers and a large bottle of whiskey. Sophie smiled at herself in the mirror. Things were not quite that bad. Yet.
    “It’s just two weeks,” she told herself. “You’ll be fine.”
    The bedroom door opened a crack, and Bella’s bangs peered around the corner, followed a fraction of a second later by her eyes.
    “Um, Aunty Sophie,” she said ominously. “I think you’d better come and see this.”
    Sophie instinctively steeled herself as she followed Bella back down the hallway to the living room, imagining the very worst that could have happened. She did not imagine hard enough.
    “My sofa!” Sophie cried, ignoring the child who was covered from head to foot in Thai-curry-seafood-pasta. “Oh, my God! My sofa! My…sofa.”
    Half of her cream leather sofa was now a greenish color, and so were her two faux fur cushions, their once strokable softness now converted into punklike sticky spikes.
    Izzy grinned at her. “Tea was all bleugh and yuck,” she said reasonably, by way of explanation. “So look, I made a painting with it on the sofa!” Izzy clearly thought that the artwork was something that should impress and not depress Sophie. “Is there any ice cream please?” she asked.
    Sophie resisted the urge to weep. She ran through all the legal and moral reasons she knew of why it was not a good idea to throw a child out the window until she was sure she had stopped herself from screaming. She took a deep breath and counted backward from ten just to be on the safe side.
    “What have you done to my sofa?” she said, after the countdown with much more control than she felt. “Why have you… ruined my sofa?” She turned to Bella. “Couldn’t you have stopped her? Couldn’t you have come and got me? I mean, you’re the responsible one.”
    “I’m only six and a half,” Bella said, looking irritated. “And anyway, you were on the phone and you said it was okay for us to eat on the sofa and I thought you realized that she might be a bit messy and I didn’t know that she was going to do that, did I? I just went in the kitchen to get some more water and when I came back she’d tipped it everywhere and—” Bella stopped talking, and Sophie was worried that she had made her cry. But when Bella looked up at Sophie, her eyes were dry.
    “Really,” she said, giving Sophie a look of pure recrimination. “Izzy needs adult supervision.”
    “All right, I appreciate that it’s not your fault,” Sophie said. She looked at Izzy, narrowed her eyes, and tried a phrase her mum had used on her frequently as a child. “What have you got to say for yourself, young lady?”
    Izzy giggled and clapped her hand over her mouth. “Ooops,” she said. “I done a wee-wee in my pants!” The child giggled and pointed at a trickle of warm liquid running over the edge of Sophie’s sofa and dripping onto her sheepskin rug. Sophie wanted to break down and cry over her sofa, she wanted to weep for her rug, she wanted desperately to