There's an easiness to Adelaide that is seems alien to Maggie, someone who has never known ease when it comes to young girls who look like her Sadie. Her eldest daughter had pushed against everything, almost to an obsessive point. Teaching that girl sewing would have been like trying to get the cow back over the moon. And yet, here is this girl with big eyes and a baby that moves and breaths saying 'yes' to her.
"I'd be happy to show you then," Maggie says. And then, finally, she does what she is both terrified of and desperate to do. "May I hold him?" she asks. She doesn't say anything about measuring him then, she won't lie that deeply to herself that day. She wants the feel of the child in her arms, she wants to know if his head still smells like a baby's should. It feels decadent, and she's ready to be told no the way she would have if a strange woman had asked to hold her baby. She'd been obsessive about those stories of crazy women abducting children and trying to recreate the lives of their own dead babies once. Too much Criminal Minds and SVU. "Is the father....?" Maggie asks, not sure of which question she's asking. Is the father dead? Is he undead? Is he around? Do you know him still?