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“Isla isn’t feeling well. I told her that she didn’t have to go to school today.”
“No.” She looks at him, her brow wrinkling. “You told me that I didn’t have to go back this whole week. Right?”
I fold my arms across my chest and give Keir a puzzled glance.
He grimaces and shrugs a soldier. “I might’ve said that.”
“You did,” Isla informs him, with a somber countenance. “I remember every single thing you said.”
His lips twitch. “You’re like an elephant. That’s what they say. Elephants never forget.”
She shrugged her shoulders and wipes a grubby hand down the front of her white T-shirt. “Maybe,” comes her noncommittal response. Keir leans forward and puts his phone away with a sigh.
“Isla,” he says tactfully, “what if I told you that Ella is here to watch you when I can’t?”
Isla gives a tiny snort. “I want Aunt Saffron. If you can’t be here, and can’t watch me, then Saffron can.”
He exhales his breath in a long stream. “We talked about this, bumblebee. Saffron is busy with school. Just like you should be. She can’t stay with you all the time. That’s why I brought Ella here.”
Isla looks up at me, distress written across her face. It’s an odd thing to see because she is so young. I wonder what made her so skeptical of people other than Keir and Saffron.
It really makes me wonder about Isla’s mother.
“Isla, we’ve talked about this. We’ve gone over why I can’t be here and why Saffron has to be in Glasgow. Remember?”
She crosses her arms and shoots him a baleful look.
“No.”
“Well, we have. Do you need a refresher on what we talked about?”
She pokes her tongue out at him, making a face. He sort of throws his hands up and shakes his head but he doesn’t correct her behavior at all. My eyebrows rise at his lax treatment of his daughter.
Isla throws her glue sick down forcefully and it scatters across the wood floor, eventually rolling under a chair. Keir doesn’t even blink or seem to notice. I see a micro aggression happening where Isla looks at him, sees that he didn’t notice her miniature tantrum, and picks up the scissors instead. Before she has the chance to throw them, I launch forward and pluck the scissors from her hand. She looks surprised, as if she was surprised that I have noticed her little melodrama. But in the next second, her expression turns into a pout.
“What did you do that for?”
“You can’t throw scissors. It could really hurt someone, Isla.”
She snorts. “No. It wouldn’t hurt anybody. And you don’t even know what I was about to do anyway.”
My eyebrows rise and I look to Keir for support. He is rummaging around in his pockets again, looking for his phone. At this point, I’m not even surprised that Isla tries so hard to get his attention.
“Keir! Will you pay attention to what’s going on here?”
He glances up, a deer in headlights. “What?”
I take the scissors that I just took from Isla and set them down by my side with an exasperated noise.
“What’s the issue?”
I look at Isla, my eyes whitening. “Is he always like this?”
Isla blinks, swallows hard, and then nods very slowly. “Mostly,” she says.
“What did I miss?” Keir asks.
It’s clear to me that there is a major disconnect between these two. But I am not even sure where to begin. No wonder young Isla is acting out. She has no one to listen to her, no one other than Saffron and occasionally Keir.
