Sonia

Sonia is Joel’s new girlfriend, soon to become his wife, and a caring presence in the lives of his daughters. She is presented indirectly, through the family’s plans and Carmel’s thoughts: the children are traveling with her and their father, while Carmel tries to reconcile their affection for Sonia with the sense that her own place in the family has been diminished.

Identity and Introduction

Sonia enters the account as Joel’s partner after his marriage to Carmel has ended. Carmel understands that Joel and Sonia are together and that Sonia is expected to become his wife. Their relationship is described as part of the practical arrangements of the post-divorce family, but for Carmel it also sharpens the emotional meaning of being left: Joel has moved on, while she continues to experience the separation as an unacknowledged loss.

Sonia is characterized primarily through the children’s reports and Carmel’s private reactions, not through direct scenes of her speaking or acting. The available account gives no independent history or perspective for Sonia; instead, her role takes shape at the point where the children’s life with their father meets Carmel’s grief about her changed place in it.

Life with Joel and the Children

Joel and Sonia take Carmel’s daughters on a European holiday during the January school break. The proposed itinerary includes Disneyland in Paris, skiing in Austria, and ice skating in Rome. Carmel experiences the trip as one Joel and she had once discussed taking together, now being realized without her. She keeps that hurt to herself, tells Joel that it sounds like fun, and arranges the children’s passports.

Carmel tries to reassure herself that the girls are safe and happy. She knows that they are traveling with their father and Sonia, that they are staying in an Airbnb in Paris Sonia has used before, and that the children have new jackets for the winter weather. In her effort to imagine the trip as a good experience for them, she calls it an educational adventure and a chance for her to recharge. The itinerary thus carries two meanings at once: a family holiday for the children and a painful reminder to Carmel of a shared future that has passed to Joel and Sonia.

The children appear to have formed a warm attachment to Sonia. Rosie tells Carmel that Sonia loves them more than life itself, after having met her only a few times. Carmel’s outward response is approving, although inwardly she resists the implication that Sonia can simply occupy a maternal place in the girls’ lives. Her contrast between what she says aloud and what she thinks reveals how carefully she tries to remain agreeable for the children’s sake, even when their affection for Sonia intensifies her own insecurity.

Carmel’s Perception of Sonia

Sonia’s presence provokes comparison as well as jealousy. While swimming during the retreat, Carmel notices an older woman whose hair resembles Sonia’s and imagines that both women pay handsomely for it. The observation connects Sonia, in Carmel’s mind, with appearance and the pressure to measure herself against another woman. Carmel’s thoughts about her body and her wish to transform it are tied to the hope that Joel might be struck by how she looks, even though she says she does not want him back.

That comparison also touches Carmel’s concerns about motherhood and resemblance. Her daughter Lulu is fair-haired and looks unlike Carmel. When Lulu recounts that a woman praised her hair as being like her mummy’s while she was out with Joel and Sonia, Carmel responds with a strained question about whether Lulu explained that Sonia was not her mother. The moment shows the tension between the children’s easy social world and Carmel’s effort to guard the distinction between herself and the woman who now shares their family life.

Narrative Role and Significance

Sonia remains an indirect character, but her importance lies in how the novel uses her presence to expose the continuing emotional effects of divorce. The holiday and the children’s affection for her are not presented as proof that Sonia has displaced Carmel as their mother; rather, they show how ordinary, positive family arrangements can feel like exclusion to someone still grieving the marriage. Carmel’s outward politeness, including her help with the passports and her cheerful response to the trip, contrasts with the hurt she keeps private.

Through Sonia, the narrative also makes visible the difference between a family’s practical adaptation and Carmel’s slower emotional adjustment. Sonia is part of Joel’s new household and a trusted adult to the girls, while Carmel’s thoughts repeatedly return to what she and Joel once planned, how the children see Sonia, and how her own body and identity seem to have changed. The evidence does not give Sonia a resolution or a separate arc; her significance is relational, defined by the new family arrangement and by the painful comparisons it awakens in Carmel.