‘She gave all her physical love to the dolls. She cradled and cooed over them all day long.’
Mr Laing nodded at the memories.
Sensing the baby was getting bored with the keys, Bryant stood and began walking around the room, talking to her softly.
Elaine kept a watchful eye on his movements.
‘Carry on,’ Kim urged.
‘She turned twelve and all hell let loose. We argued, she disobeyed every rule. At first, I thought it was typical adolescence, but then I saw a rage in her, a fierce anger that seemed to be consuming my daughter. She was a stranger to me, and it wasn’t until she was fifteen that she told me the truth.’
Kim guessed what was coming.
‘She told me she was gay. I was relieved. She’d finally shared what she’d been struggling to accept in herself. It broke my heart that she felt that way, but they were her demons and I knew we could work through it together.’
‘And you accepted her?’ Kim asked, thinking of how differently Jamie’s mother had reacted to her son’s sexuality.
Elaine frowned. ‘Of course. She was still our daughter. We loved her unconditionally. There is nothing she could have told me that would have made me love her any less. I thought we’d uncovered the demon, but I was wrong.
‘Admitting to being gay wasn’t the problem. She wasn’t worried about telling us. The issue was that she didn’t want to be. The very idea of it repulsed her. She didn’t want to be different. She wanted a boyfriend, marriage, a family. I told her she could have anything she wanted with the right person.’
‘What happened?’ Kim asked, trying to imagine the conflict that had been raging in Sarah’s mind.
‘She didn’t really speak to me about it again. It was almost like I’d given her the wrong response.’
Kim could see the irony in that situation. Elaine had been open and accepting yet it hadn’t been right.
‘It was like she’d expected me to take it away, somehow make it right. I felt awful because I couldn’t solve what she perceived to be a terrible problem. I sought help from professionals to see if I’d done something wrong. I asked them if I’d made it worse. They assured me I’d done the right thing so I just waited to see what would happen.’
‘Did she ever bring anyone home – friends, girlfriend?’
Elaine shook her head. ‘No, and I didn’t push her. I thought it’d be like your typical ten-year-old boy who hates girls and puts worms in their hair and then they reach a certain age and realise they weren’t so bad after all. Truthfully, I didn’t know what to do. I just hoped she’d eventually accept herself. I mean, how do you help someone not to be gay? It’s who she is – was.’
Mr Laing squeezed her hand.
‘The baby?’ Kim asked.
Elaine sighed heavily. ‘We don’t know who the father is. Sarah left home when she was nineteen, and since then she grew more and more distant. The visits turned to phone calls and then the odd text message. I’d try to ring, I’d get no answer and then later I’d get a text saying “call you soon” or something like that.
‘We lost contact completely for a few months before we saw her again six months ago. We hadn’t even known she was pregnant. She brought Amy to us at just a few weeks old.’
Kim’s brain was doing the calculation. It was six months ago that Sarah Sizzle appeared to have been born and the dating profiles initiated.
‘She begged us to take care of Amy. She wouldn’t tell us where she’d been or the circumstances around Amy. She would only say that right now she wasn’t in the right place to take care of her child. She told us she was sorry and that she loved us. That was the last time we saw her. We offered to help her, have her move back home for a while to support her, but she refused.’
‘She didn’t return to see Amy?’
Elaine shook her head. ‘I worked out how to send photos to her phone and I’d get heart emojis back, but she didn’t come home again.’
There was little point asking her parents if they knew of any recent threat or conflict in her life, as they appeared to know even less about new Sarah than her team did.
Kim thanked them for their time and left a card in case they needed anything.
Bryant handed a sleepy Amy back to her grandmother.
If Sarah had been so keen to have a child, why hadn’t she wanted this one?
TWENTY-EIGHT