an old refrain
The knock came at ten past six, which meant Erik was running late, which meant Peter was in the car with the engine running and a particular expression on his face that Steph didn't need to see to know was there.
She opened the door. Erik stood on the step with Tima on his hip and a bag over his shoulder that looked like it had been packed by someone in a hurry, which it had.
"Sorry, sorry — Peter's —"
"In the car. I know. Go."
"Her milk's in the side pocket. The inhaler's in the front zip. Hoppy's —"
Tima held up Hoppy. The hippo's purple eye-patch was askew. He looked like he'd had a long day.
"I can see Hoppy," Steph said. "Come here, cariad."
Tima reached for her — that full-body lean that toddlers do, the absolute commitment of weight before the hands arrive — and Steph took her, settling her on her hip with the practiced ease of a woman who had been carrying children for four years and whose left arm had developed accordingly.
"She's had dinner," Erik said. "Well — she's had some dinner. She ate the potato. She posted the broccoli behind the sofa. I'll deal with that when I get back.”
"Don't worry about the broccoli."
"She might need changing before bed. And she's been —" He paused, looking at Tima, who was now examining the zip on Steph's fleece with forensic interest. "She's been a bit clingy today. I don't know if it's teeth or —"
"Erik."
He stopped.
"She'll be fine. Go."
He looked at his daughter. Tima looked back at him with the even, steady gaze that she gave to most things — the gaze that made her look not like a twenty-two-month-old but like someone much older and quieter who happened to be very small. She reached out and touched his face with one hand, a flat, open-palmed press against his cheek.
"Papa," she said.
"I'll see you Sunday, love." He kissed her forehead. He kissed it again. He looked at Steph over Tima's head and something passed between them — not worry, not quite gratitude, something more like the unspoken contract they'd been honouring for two years now: *I'm trusting you with the most important thing I have, and we both know it, and we don't need to say it.*
"Go," Steph said, softer this time.
He went.
Steph stood in the doorway and watched the car pull away — Peter's old Toyota, the exhaust visible in the cold December air, the brake lights flaring once at the corner and then gone. Tima watched too. She was still on Steph's hip, one hand on Steph's collar, the other holding Hoppy by his ear. She didn't cry. She didn't call out. She just watched the space where the car had been, as if waiting for it to come back, and when it didn't, she turned to Steph and said:
"Gone."
"Gone," Steph agreed. "But he'll be back."
Tima considered this. Then she pointed into the house.
"Eira?"
"She's inside. Shall we go find her?"
"Eira," Tima said again, with more certainty this time, as if the name itself was a decision, and she'd made it.
Eira had been preparing.
This was evident from the state of the living room, which looked like a small, determined person had attempted to redecorate it using only cushions, blankets, and a selection of stuffed animals arranged in what could only be described as a defensive formation around a nest of pillows on the floor.
"It's Tima's bed," Eira announced from the middle of the arrangement, her chestnut curls wild, her face flushed with the exertion of significant creative work. "I made it. It's better than the cot."
"The cot is already set up in your room, cariad."
"This is better. It has a roof." She held up a blanket. "See? Roof."
"That's a blanket."
"It's a roof-blanket."
Tima was already wriggling to get down. Steph set her on the floor and she stood for a moment — that wide-legged, slightly swaying stance, like a sailor on a shifting deck — and then walked toward Eira with the focused determination she brought to all locomotion. She was steady now, at twenty-two months. Not graceful — grace would come later, or maybe never; maybe Tima would always move the way she moved, with that deliberate, considered quality, each step a small decision — but steady. She reached the cushion nest and stood at its edge, looking down at it the way a surveyor looks at a building site.
"Dat," she said, pointing.
"It's yours!" Eira said. "Sit down. I'll get your blanket."
Tima sat. She sat the way she always sat — straight down, no lowering, just a controlled collapse, her legs folding under her. She looked around at the cushions. She looked at the stuffed animals. She picked up a felt rabbit she didn't recognise and held it up to Hoppy, as if introducing them.
"Oppy," she said, pressing the rabbit against Hoppy's face.
"That's Mr Carrots," Eira informed her. "He's nice but he's quite old. Be gentle."
Tima put Mr Carrots down with exaggerated care.
"Right," Steph said from the doorway, watching the two of them — Eira already rearranging the nest to accommodate its guest, Tima sitting in the middle of it with the serene gravity of a visiting dignitary. "Bath in twenty minutes."
"Can Tima have bubbles?"
"Everyone gets bubbles."
"Can Tima have the duck?"
"The duck is communal property, Eira."
"What's communal?"
"It means you share."
Eira processed this. "Okay. But I get the duck first."
Bath time was, as it always was with two, an exercise in managed catastrophe.
The bathroom in Steph's house was small — a bath wedged against the wall, a toilet, a sink, and approximately four inches of floor space that was, within thirty seconds of running the water, entirely covered in a thin film of splashed bathwater, discarded clothes, and one wet hippo.
Eira went in first because Eira always went in first because Eira had explained, at length and on multiple occasions, that she was bigger and therefore had seniority and therefore the water should be tested on her first, for safety. Steph suspected this was less about safety and more about having uninterrupted access to the duck, but she'd stopped arguing about it months ago. Some battles were not worth the energy they cost.
Tima stood on the bath mat in her nappy, watching Eira splash with the patient attention of someone waiting for their appointment. Steph knelt beside her, testing the water, checking the temperature with her elbow the way her own mother had done, the way mothers had been checking bath temperature since the invention of baths and elbows.
"Ready, bach?"
Tima raised her arms. Steph peeled off the nappy, lifted her in. The warm water received her and Tima went still for a moment — that full-body pause she did whenever something new happened, the processing, the taking in — and then she slapped the surface with both palms and laughed.
"Dat!" she said, slapping again. "Dat! Dat!"
"Water," Eira said, already in teacher mode. "Say *water*."
"Wa."
"Wa-ter."
"Wa."
"Good enough," Eira said, and returned to the duck.
Steph washed them both — Eira first (who submitted to hair-washing with the resigned dignity of a cat being bathed), then Tima (who submitted to nothing and had to be gently restrained while Steph worked shampoo through her dark curls with one hand and kept her from drinking the bathwater with the other).
"She's drinking it again," Eira reported.
"I can see that."
"Is bath water bad for you?"
"It's not ideal."
"Will she turn into a fish?"
"Unlikely."
"But possible?"
Steph rinsed Tima's hair, feeling the small skull beneath her fingers, the soft skin, the warmth of her. "Anything's possible, cariad. But fish is low on the list."
She lifted Tima out and wrapped her in a towel — the green one, the soft one — and Tima curled into her, wet and warm and smelling of the lavender baby wash Steph had bought specifically for weekends like this. She held her for a moment longer than was strictly necessary. Tima's face was pressed against her neck. Her fingers were gripping the towel. Hoppy was on the floor, face-down in a puddle, looking like he'd been through something.
"Mummy?" Eira called from the bath. "Can I have more bubbles?"
"You've had three doses of bubbles."
"I need four."
"Nobody needs four doses of bubbles."
"I do. I'm special."
Steph added more bubbles. She was not, as a policy, in the business of denying her daughter claims of specialness. The world would do enough of that later.
Pyjamas. Milk. The winding-down.
Eira's room was small and bright — yellow walls, a bookshelf overflowing with picture books and the odd chapter book she wasn't quite ready for but kept because she liked the covers, a lamp shaped like a mushroom that cast warm shadows across the ceiling. The travel cot was set up in the corner, Tima's sleeping bag already laid out inside it, the pillow arranged just so. Eira's bed was across the room, the duvet decorated with stars.
Tima sat on Steph's lap in the rocking chair, drinking her milk from the cup with the handles — the slow, rhythmic suck-and-pause of a child winding down. Her eyes were open but unfocused, that glazed, half-here look that meant sleep was arriving whether she wanted it to or not. Hoppy was recovered from the bathroom floor, dried, and reinstated to his position under her arm. His eye-patch was still crooked but nobody mentioned it.
Eira was in bed, propped on one elbow, watching.
"Is she asleep?"
"Nearly," Steph whispered.
"Her eyes are still open."
"That's how she does it. She goes to sleep with her eyes open and then they close at the end."
"That's weird."
"That's Tima."
Eira considered this, then lay down, pulling the duvet to her chin. "Will she be scared in the cot?"
"She won't be scared. She'll have Hoppy. And you'll be right there."
"I'll protect her," Eira said, matter-of-fact. "If she cries, I'll sing to her."
"What will you sing?"
"The whale song. The one from school."
"Perfect."
Steph lowered Tima into the cot — slowly, the careful negotiation of transferring a nearly-asleep child without triggering the motion sensor that all toddlers seemed to have wired directly to their consciousness. Tima's body stiffened for a moment as it left the warmth of Steph's lap — that micro-waking, the brief flash of eyes, the fingers tightening on Hoppy — and then she sank. Into the sleeping bag. Into the cot. Into whatever children go to when the day lets go of them.
Steph stood there. She looked at Tima — the dark curls against the white sheet, the steady rise and fall of breath, the way her mouth was slightly open, the way her hand was curled around Hoppy's ear. She looked at Eira — already halfway to sleep herself, one arm hanging off the bed, her hair fanned across the pillow.
Two children in one room. The orange glow of the street light through the curtains. The faint hum of the fridge downstairs. The distant sound of the river, or what might have been the river, or might have been the road, or might have been nothing at all — just the sound that Ty Sign made at night, the low, constant breath of a place being itself.
Steph pulled the door to. Not closed. Just to. She left the landing light on, the way she always did — a thin line of gold beneath the door.
Downstairs, the house was quiet. The cushion-nest was still assembled in the living room. A rice cake she hadn't noticed was wedged between two sofa cushions. A small sock — Tima's — lay on the carpet like a flag someone had planted and walked away from.
She made tea. She sat on the sofa. She held the mug in both hands and let the quiet settle.
The house held two sleeping children now. Hers and not-hers. Both hers tonight. The weight of that — not heavy, not light. Just present. Real. The same weight it always was, on the weekends when Tima stayed, on the nights when Erik needed someone to be the mother, and Steph was there, and Steph was always there, and the word for what she was didn't exist in any language she knew but the feeling of it was exact and permanent and needed no name at all.
She drank her tea. She listened to the house. She waited for nothing in particular.
The weekend had begun.
Tima woke at quarter to six.
Steph heard her through the monitor — not crying, not calling out. Just talking. The low, private babble of a child who has woken in a room that is not her room and is negotiating this fact with the only person she trusts completely.
"Oppy," she said. Then a pause. Then a string of syllables that were not words but had the cadence of words — rising, falling, a question mark at the end. Another pause. "Oppy." A rustling sound. The creak of the cot. More babble, softer now, confiding, as if she was telling the hippo something important and didn't want to be overheard.
Steph lay in bed and listened. She knew this sound. She had known it with Eira — the pre-dawn monologue, the child waking into her own language, the murmured conversation with the dark. It was one of the most private things a child did, this talking before anyone came. Before the world arrived with its breakfast and its shoes and its agenda. Just the child and the ceiling and whatever lived in the space between waking and being awake.
She gave it five minutes. Then she went in.
Tima was standing in the cot, Hoppy in one hand, the other hand gripping the rail. Her hair was flattened on one side and vertical on the other. Her sleeping bag was bunched around her knees. She looked up when Steph opened the door and her face did the thing Steph had seen a thousand times with Eira but that still landed every time — the brightening. Not a smile, exactly. Something before a smile. The moment the face recognises someone it was hoping to see.
"Hiya," Tima said.
"Bore da, bach," Steph whispered. "Early bird, you are."
She lifted her out. Tima was warm from sleep, dense and heavy in the way that recently-woken toddlers are — as if gravity has a stronger hold on children first thing in the morning. She curled into Steph, one fist on the collar, one fist on Hoppy, her face pressed into Steph's neck. She smelled of sleep and the lavender wash from last night and something else, something underneath, the specific scent that every child carries and that belongs to no one else.
Eira didn't stir. Eira could sleep through anything. Eira had slept through a thunderstorm, a smoke alarm, and, on one memorable occasion, Peter accidentally dropping a toolbox on the kitchen floor at seven in the morning. She was committed to sleep in the way she was committed to everything — completely and without compromise.
Steph carried Tima downstairs. The house was cold — the heating hadn't come on yet, wouldn't for another half hour — and their breath made faint clouds in the kitchen. She settled Tima in the highchair, wrapped a blanket around her, put the kettle on
"Muh," Tima said.
"Milk. I know. Coming."
She warmed the milk, poured it into the cup with the handles, set it on the tray. Tima took it with both hands and drank — that serious, intent, eyes-straight-ahead drinking that toddlers do, as if the milk might escape if they weren't sufficiently focused on it.
The kitchen filled with the hum of the kettle and the ticking of the radiator coming to life and the small, steady sounds of a house waking up. Steph made her tea. She stood at the counter and watched Tima drink and felt the particular quality of December mornings — the darkness outside, the warmth assembling itself inside, the sense that the world was smaller in winter, drawn in, held close.
Tima put the cup down. She looked at Steph.
"Da," she said, pointing at the window. Outside, the street light cast its orange circle on the pavement. Frost glittered on the cars.
"It's still dark," Steph said. "The sun's not up yet."
Tima considered this information. "Da," she said again, with slightly different emphasis, as if she were filing an amendment.
"The sun will come. It's just slow today."
Tima picked up the cup. Drank. Put it down. Picked up Hoppy. Put him down. Picked up the cup. The morning rhythm of a child who is awake but hasn't yet decided what being awake will require.
By half eight, Eira was up, breakfast was a war zone, and Steph was mentally calculating how much time she needed to get two children into outdoor clothes and out the door before the market got too crowded.
The answer, as always, was: more time than she had.
Eira had eaten toast soldiers with marmalade (her current obsession — not jam, not peanut butter, marmalade, and specifically the thick-cut kind with the peel in it, because she was four and had opinions). Tima had eaten half a banana, a handful of dry cereal, a piece of toast that she'd licked the butter off and then rejected, and something off the floor that Steph chose not to investigate.
"Shoes," Steph said, holding up Tima's boots.
Tima looked at the boots. She looked at Steph. She held up Hoppy.
"Oppy shoes?"
"Hoppy doesn't need shoes. Hoppy is a hippo."
"Oppy shoes," Tima repeated, more firmly.
Eira appeared in the hallway, already coated, hatted, and gloved, with the faintly martyred air of someone who had been ready for hours and was suffering greatly at the inefficiency of others. "We're going to be late," she said.
"Late for what? There's no appointment at a Christmas market."
"There IS. There's a puppet show at ten and if we miss it I will be devastated."
"Devastated."
"Completely."
Steph got Tima into her boots, her coat, her hat (which Tima immediately removed), her hat again (which Tima removed again), and eventually a compromise was reached in which the hat was allowed to exist on Tima's head but not to cover her ears, which meant it perched on the top of her skull like a small decorative tower and served no thermal purpose whatsoever.
They left the house. The pushchair. The bag. The snacks. The nappies. The spare outfit. The inhaler. Hoppy, who was wedged into the pushchair beside Tima and looked as though he was being taken somewhere against his will.
Ty Sign in December was the colour of pewter and breath. The terraced houses ran in rows up the hill, their front doors painted in colours that the cold had dimmed to pastels — blue, green, red — and the cars on the street wore frost like a second skin. Steph's breath came in small clouds. Eira walked beside the pushchair, one hand on the frame, one hand in her coat pocket, her chestnut curls spilling from under her hat. She was narrating.
"Christmas market," she said. "There'll be presents and lights and little houses and food and — Mummy, will there be reindeer?"
"There won't be reindeer."
"But maybe."
"There won't be reindeer."
"One very small reindeer?"
"Eira."
"Fine. But there better be hot chocolate."
Tima pointed from the pushchair. "Da," she said, pointing at a cat on a wall. "Da," pointing at a crow on a bin. "Da," pointing at a decoration in someone's window — a string of coloured lights that blinked on and off in a pattern that only the lights understood.
"She says dat to everything," Eira observed.
"She says da to everything because everything is worth pointing at."
"Even bins?"
"Especially bins. Bins are very interesting if you're twenty-two months old."
"I don't remember being twenty-two months old."
"Nobody does. That's the trick of it."
The Tredegar Grounds sat in the bowl of the valley, the park gates open, the path leading in through a corridor of trees whose bare branches had been strung with fairy lights — white ones, not coloured, the kind that looked like constellations had come down to live in the oaks for the season. They glowed softly in the grey morning, not competing with the daylight but supplementing it, adding a layer of warmth that the sky, flat and pale above the valley, couldn't quite provide on its own.
Tima saw the lights. She went still in the pushchair — that full-body attention, the sudden cessation of all movement that meant something had arrived in her field of vision that required everything. She pointed. Her hand trembled slightly with the effort of indicating something so important.
"Da," she said. Then, quieter: "Da."
"Lights," Steph said. "Christmas lights."
Tima kept her hand up, pointed at the canopy of white dots, and didn't lower it for the full length of the path.
The market opened ahead of them — small wooden booths arranged around the central green, each one painted dark green or left as natural wood, with handwritten signs and awnings of canvas. Candles in jars. Dried flowers in bundles. Welsh cakes on a griddle, the sweet butter smell of them cutting through the cold air. A booth selling honey from a farm in the Sirhowy valley, the jars lined up like amber lanterns. A woman with a knitting stall, sitting in a folding chair behind towers of coloured wool, reading a paperback and not at all concerned about selling anything. A man carving wooden spoons, the curls of pale wood gathering at his feet.
And in the middle of it all, on his stone plinth, the Samson statue — the bearded figure in his loincloth, one arm raised — wearing, as he did every December, a Santa hat that someone from the town council (or possibly just someone with a ladder and a sense of humour) had placed on his bronze head. He looked, Steph thought, quite dignified about it. Like a man who has survived since 1897 and can survive a hat.
Eira pulled at Steph's hand. "Puppet show. Where."
"I don't know yet. We just got here."
"But it's AT TEN."
"It's half nine."
"That's ALMOST ten."
Steph parked the pushchair near the bandstand, where a small brass ensemble was setting up — four men and a woman with instruments that gleamed in the grey light, their breath rising in clouds as they unpacked music stands and stamped their feet. She lifted Tima out and settled her on her hip. Tima immediately pointed at the tuba.
"Da!"
"That's a tuba."
"Da!" More emphatic this time.
"Big, isn't it?"
Tima reached toward it with one hand, as if the distance between herself and the tuba was a problem she intended to solve.
"Not today, bach. Let's find those Welsh cakes."
They moved through the market the way you move through anything with a four-year-old and a toddler — slowly, erratically, stopping every few metres for a new discovery. Eira found the candle stall and declared she could smell Christmas. Tima found a booth selling wooden toys and attempted to dismantle a stacking tower with the quiet efficiency of someone who builds things by first understanding how they come apart. The woman behind the stall watched with the amused patience of someone who had seen many toddlers and understood that the toys were not hers to protect from small hands.
The Welsh cakes came from a booth near the iron railings, cooked on a flat griddle by a woman in a striped apron who handed them over in paper bags that were immediately translucent with butter. Steph bit into one — warm, sugary, dense, the raisins soft and the outside just brown enough — and felt the particular satisfaction of Welsh cakes eaten outdoors in December, which is a satisfaction that cannot be replicated in any other month or any other location.
She broke a piece off for Tima. Tima took it, examined it, smelled it, tasted a corner, looked at Steph with an expression of cautious approval, and then ate the rest in one go.
"More," she said. "Muh."
"More?"
"Muh!"
Steph gave her another piece. Tima ate it with her eyes closed, which was something she did sometimes — closed her eyes to eat, as if removing one sense made the others louder. Steph had noticed this before. The way Tima experienced things wasn't faster than other children — it was deeper. She went into sensation the way some people go into water: completely, with nothing held back.
The puppet show was set up under a canopy near the Samson statue — a small wooden-frame theatre, the kind with felt curtains in red and gold and a scalloped arch above the stage. The puppeteer was a woman with short grey hair and fingerless gloves, and she worked two hand puppets at once with the casual dexterity of someone who had been doing this at local markets for twenty years and could probably do it in her sleep.
The show was simple — a dragon and a sheep, arguing about who owned a Christmas pudding. The dragon wanted to eat it. The sheep wanted to wear it as a hat. The audience was mostly under five and mostly delighted.
Eira sat cross-legged at the front, her face tilted up, her mouth open, completely gone into the story. She shouted advice to the sheep. She booed the dragon. She cheered when the pudding was ultimately shared between them (though she whispered to the child next to her that the sheep should have kept the whole thing).
Tima was on Steph's lap. She didn't shout. She didn't squirm. She was perfectly, absolutely still — that watchful stillness that was so much a part of who she was, the capacity to attend to something with her whole self. Her eyes followed the puppets. Her mouth was slightly open. One hand rested on Steph's arm, the fingers occasionally tightening when the dragon roared or the sheep squeaked, but she didn't look away. Not once. The whole ten minutes, she watched without blinking, as if the puppet show was the most important thing that had ever been shown to her and she owed it the courtesy of her complete attention.
When it ended and the puppets took their bow, Eira leaped up and clapped with the violence of genuine appreciation. Tima clapped too — she brought her hands together in that off-centre toddler clap, the one where the hands don't quite meet in the middle — and then she looked at Steph and smiled.
It was the smile that got you. Not the big laugh, not the shriek — Tima's power was in the smile. It arrived slowly, it started in her eyes, and when it reached her mouth it was so full and so certain that it made you feel like you'd been chosen. Like whatever you'd just done — in this case, sitting still and holding her — was exactly the right thing, and she was telling you so.
"Again?" she said.
"I don't think they do it again, bach."
"Again."
"Maybe next year."
Tima looked back at the puppet theatre, now empty, the felt curtains drawn. She pointed.
"Gone," she said. The same word she'd used when Erik left last night. The same flat acceptance. Things go. That's what things do.
"Gone," Steph agreed. "But we remembered it. That's what matters."
It happened by the carol singers.
They were standing near the bandstand — Steph with Tima on her hip, Eira holding Steph's free hand — listening to the brass ensemble play O Holy Night, the notes hanging in the cold air with the kind of resonance that brass makes in winter, bright and ancient and full of something that doesn't need a name. There were other families around them, other children, the whole small crowd drawn together by the music and the fairy lights and the Welsh cakes and the particular magic of a December morning in a park that has been holding its town for a hundred and twenty years.
Eira tugged Steph's hand. "Mummy, look!" She was pointing at a booth they hadn't seen — a woman making candyfloss, the pink cloud spinning on its stick like something from a circus.
"Mummy, can I have some? Can I?"
And Tima, on Steph's hip, turned her face toward Steph — close, a few inches away, so close that Steph could feel her breath — and said:
"Mummy."
Not a question. Not a shout. Just the word. Clear, soft, shaped by a mouth that was still learning how to shape things. She'd heard Eira say it and she'd repeated it, the way she repeated everything Eira said, the way she was always learning from the girl beside her, absorbing her vocabulary like water into sand.
She didn't know what it meant. Or she knew exactly what it meant, in the way that children know things — not through definition but through feeling, through the body's understanding of who holds you and feeds you and carries you through the market on a cold Saturday morning with your hippo in one hand and your world reduced to the circle of someone's arms.
Steph didn't correct her. She didn't say *I'm not your Mummy, cariad*. She didn't explain. She just breathed — one breath, held for a beat longer than the music required — and shifted Tima higher on her hip and said:
"I know, love. I see it."
And they went to get the candyfloss. And the morning continued. And the word hung in the air the way the brass notes did — not fading, not resolving, just present. A sound made. A truth touched. An old refrain that nobody had written but that everyone, in the park, in the valley, in the long repeating history of women holding children who needed holding, already knew.
The afternoon was the colour of sleep.
They walked home from the market along the canal path, Eira's candyfloss reduced to a sticky pink residue on her chin and both hands, Tima dozing in the pushchair with Hoppy on her chest and her hat (the useless one, the perched one) finally removed and resting in her lap like a collapsed souffle. The canal was flat and dark under the December sky, and somewhere above the valley Twmbarlwm sat in the mist like something waiting.
Steph pushed the chair with one hand and held Eira's sticky hand with the other and thought about nothing in particular, which was a luxury she so rarely had that when it arrived she noticed it the way you notice the first warm day after winter — with a kind of startled gratitude.
They got home. Tima was transferred from pushchair to sofa without waking (a miracle — the child had the motion sensor of a bomb disposal technician). Eira was sent to wash her hands, a process that took fifteen minutes and resulted in the bathroom tap running continuously while she forgot what she'd come in for and began examining her own reflection with the intense scrutiny of a woman about to deliver a keynote address.
Steph made tea. She stood at the kitchen counter and drank it standing up, which was — and had been for four years — the only way she drank tea during daylight hours. Sitting down to drink tea was an evening activity. A luxury activity. An activity that belonged to the theoretical future version of herself who had time and didn't have yoghurt in her hair.
The house was quiet. Tima asleep on the sofa, covered with the green blanket. Eira somewhere upstairs, drawing or talking to herself or arranging something into a configuration that would make sense only to her. The central heating ticking. The fridge humming. The street outside empty, the way streets in Ty Sign were always empty on Saturday afternoons — everyone inside, everyone in their own orbit, the estate holding itself quietly until someone needed something.
Steph reached for the small altar on the kitchen windowsill — not consciously, just by habit. Her fingers touched the smooth stone she kept there, the piece of rose quartz she'd found in the Sirhowy and polished herself. She didn't say anything. Didn't pray. She just touched it, the way she sometimes touched the door frame, or the bannister, or the top of Eira's head — a small anchoring, a checking in with the physical world that held her.
The phone rang.
She picked up on the second ring, keeping her voice low.
"Hiya."
"Hey." Erik's voice. Road noise in the background, the muffled sound of a car heater. "How's she been?"
"She's been brilliant. She's asleep now — she passed out on the way back from the market."
"The market? You took them to Tredegar Grounds?"
"Puppet show, Welsh cakes, the works. Eira's convinced we missed the reindeer. Tima watched the puppet show like it was an important documentary."
She heard him smile. You could hear Erik smile — something about the breath, the way the silence changed texture.
"How's the job?" she asked.
"Boiler's older than Peter. He's convinced it's personal — says it's fighting him because it knows he's Cornish. We should have it done by tomorrow morning."
"Peter says hello?"
A muffled exchange in the background. Then: "Peter says he hopes you haven't let Eira reorganise his room again."
"Tell Peter his room was reorganised the moment he left. Eira has installed a sign that says 'Eira's Office' on the door."
More background noise. Peter saying something she couldn't catch. Erik laughing.
"Can I — is Tima awake? Can I talk to her?"
Steph looked at the sofa. Tima was stirring — the micro-movements of a toddler surfacing from a nap, the shifting, the frown, the hand tightening on Hoppy and then releasing. Her eyes opened. They focused on the ceiling, then the room, then Steph.
"Hold on," Steph said. She crossed to the sofa and knelt beside it. "Tima? Bach? Papa's on the phone. Do you want to talk to Papa?"
Tima blinked. She was still half-asleep, that blurred, warm, not-quite-here state that naps produced. But at the word *Papa*, something focused. Her eyes found the phone in Steph's hand. She reached for it.
Steph held it to her ear. Not against it — toddlers and ear-to-phone alignment was an inexact science — but close enough.
"Hello, love," Erik said. Steph could hear his voice through the speaker, thin and warm, reduced to electricity and air.
Tima went still. The absolute stillness she did when something important was happening — every sense directed at one point. She held the phone (or held Steph's hand that held the phone) and listened. Her face changed the way a sky changes when the sun finds a gap in the cloud — slowly, from the inside.
"Papa," she said.
"Yes, it's me. I'm here. Are you having a good time with Steph?"
A pause. Tima looked at the phone. She looked at Steph. She looked back at the phone, as if trying to work out where the voice was coming from and why it was inside this small, flat object and not in the room where it belonged.
"Papa," she said again, softer.
"I'll see you tomorrow, okay? I'll come and get you tomorrow."
Tima held the phone in silence for a moment. Then she did something Steph wasn't expecting — she turned the phone around and held it up to Hoppy's face.
"Oppy," she said. Showing him. Letting the hippo hear. Because if Papa was in there, then Hoppy should hear him too, because Hoppy was important and so was Papa and the two most important things should know each other even through a phone.
Steph heard Erik make a sound — not a word, not a laugh. Something caught between the two. Something in the throat.
"Hi, Hoppy," Erik said.
Tima took the phone back. She pressed it against her own ear, hard, so hard that Steph gently adjusted the angle to stop her from pushing it through her skull. She listened to whatever Erik was saying — Steph couldn't hear it now, just the murmur — and then she held the phone out toward Steph.
She pushed it against Steph's cheek.
"Papa," she said.*
Steph took the phone. "She's showing you to everyone."
"I heard." His voice was different now — thicker, rounder, the voice of a man who has heard his daughter's voice through a phone on a Saturday afternoon and is trying to hold together.
"She's fine, Erik. She's happy. She's being very Tima about everything."
"What does that mean?"
"It means she's watching everything like she's taking notes and eating with her eyes closed and pointing at things I'd forgotten existed. It means she's fine."
A pause. "Thank you," he said. Simply. The way he always said it — not enough words, not elaborate, just the thing itself.
"Don't thank me. She's my girl too."
She hadn't planned to say it. It came out the way true things come out — unbidden, unedited, from somewhere below the place where you compose sentences. *She's my girl too.* Four words that said everything that had no name.
Erik was quiet for a moment. Then: "I know she is."
They said goodbye. Steph put the phone down. Tima was sitting on the sofa now, Hoppy in her lap, looking at the space where the phone had been. She pointed at Steph's hand.
"Papa?"
"Papa's coming tomorrow."
"Papa gone?"
"Papa's not gone. He's just — somewhere else for a bit. He'll be back."
Tima looked at Hoppy. She looked at Steph. She held her arms up — the universal toddler gesture, the demand that is also a request that is also a trust: *pick me up, hold me, be the thing that fills the space where the other thing was.*
Steph picked her up.
Later — after the holding, after the quiet, after Tima had slid off Steph's lap and returned to the sofa to conduct further negotiations with Hoppy — Steph found her phone. The old Sony Ericsson, the one with the scratched screen and the camera that made everything look like it had been filmed through a jar of honey. She didn't think about it. She just picked it up, and Tima was sitting there in her yellow cardigan with the purple pacifier in her mouth, and the light from the window was soft and grey, and Steph pressed record.
"What's red in Welsh?" she asked.
Tima looked up. The pacifier bobbed. "Emm... coch."
Steph reached over and took the pacifier gently from her mouth — so she could say it properly, so the sounds would come out clear. Tima surrendered it without protest, which was unusual. She was in a cooperative mood. She was in the mood for this.
"What's yellow?"
Tima sat a little straighter. "Maayyeen." A hint of pride in it — the pride of a child who knows she knows this one.
"What's blue?"
"Maayyeen."
Steph paused. "Blue?"
Tima half-giggled. "Bluuehh..." Then, with renewed confidence: "It's... a... maayyeen."
"Nooh —" Steph's voice dipped into a low laugh, the warm, not-unkind laugh of a woman who has asked these questions before and will ask them again and is in no hurry to get the right answer because the asking is the point. "That's yellow. What's blue?"
Tima went serious. Her brow furrowed. The effort of it — the genuine, full-body effort of a twenty-two-month-old trying to access a word she'd heard but hadn't yet pinned to its colour. "Ehmm. Cooch."
"Aye, that's red. What is green in Welsh?"
"Eehmm... coch."
"Green."
Tima's voice went small, a little shy. "Gween."
"Green is..."
Tima let out a light *ehehe* — a giggle that was also a stall, a buying of time, the sound of a child who knows she's losing but is enjoying the game too much to mind.
"Green is gwii—" Steph prompted.
Tima looked up at the ceiling, as if the answer might be written there. "Ummm... cooch."
"Green is gwiill—"
"Gwiilth!" Tima said, landing on it with the triumphant finality of someone planting a flag.
Steph stopped filming. The clip was forty seconds, maybe less. It would live on that phone for years — through cracked screens and lost chargers and drawer burials and recoveries — and every time Steph watched it she would hear what the camera couldn't capture: the warmth of the room, the rain on the window, the particular weight of a Saturday afternoon when someone else's child is yours for the weekend and you are teaching her your language and she is getting every answer wrong and it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter at all.
Eira appeared in the doorway. "We want to watch Peppa now."
"Who's we?"
"Me and Tima. We decided."
Tima looked at Eira. She looked at Steph. She held out her hand for the pacifier.
Steph gave it back. Tima put it in her mouth with the satisfied air of someone who has completed important work and is now ready for leisure.
They watched Peppa.
Saturday evening folded into itself the way evenings with small children do — incrementally, through a series of tasks that feel both endless and somehow too fast, as if time were accordion-pleated, expanding and contracting according to rules that only children understand.
Dinner was pasta (Eira's request) with butter and cheese (Tima's requirement — she rejected all forms of sauce with the unwavering conviction of a food critic who has seen enough). Eira ate hers with a fork. Tima ate hers with her hands, one piece at a time, examining each tube of penne before committing to it. She arranged three of them on her tray in a line, studied the arrangement, rearranged them, studied again, and then ate them in reverse order.
"She's so weird," Eira said, watching this.
"She's not weird. She's careful."
"She's carefully weird."
Steph laughed. It was the kind of observation that could only come from a four-year-old — precise, unhesitant, delivered without malice or filter. Eira didn't mean weird as an insult. She meant it as a fact, the way you'd say someone was tall or left-handed. Tima was carefully weird. It was accurate.
After dinner: bath again (smoother this time — Tima had figured out the duck protocol and Eira had accepted the principle of communal waterfowl with reluctant grace). Then pyjamas, teeth (Eira's easy, Tima's a negotiation — she clamped her mouth shut and looked at Steph with the defiant dignity of a political prisoner), and the winding-down.
Eira read to Tima.
This was a thing they did — not every time Tima stayed, but most times. Eira would choose a book, climb into the cushion-nest she'd built (or, tonight, sit on the end of her bed with a blanket over her knees), and read. She couldn't really read yet — she was four, she knew her letters, she could sound out some words — but she knew the stories. She'd heard them enough to carry the shape of them, and she'd fill in what she couldn't read with what she remembered, and where she couldn't remember she'd invent, and the inventions were always better.
Tonight it was a book about a fox who lived in a tree.
"The fox had a very big house," Eira read, holding the book open on her lap so Tima could see the pictures. She turned the page. "And in the house there was a — a — Mummy, what's that word?"
"Kitchen."
"Kitchen. And in the kitchen there was a cake. And the fox said —" She looked at the picture of the fox. "He said, 'This is the best cake in all the land.'"
Tima leaned against Eira's arm, looking at the pictures. She pointed at the fox.
"Da."
"That's the fox. He's the main character. He's telling the story."
"Da." She pointed at the cake.
"That's his cake. It's chocolate."
Tima put her thumb in her mouth. Her eyes were closing — the slow, resistant blink of a child fighting the inevitable. She leaned further into Eira, her head against Eira's shoulder, her weight shifting toward sleep.
Eira kept reading. She turned the pages more slowly now, her voice dropping to match Tima's fading attention. "And the fox looked out of his window... and he saw... all the stars... and the stars were singing..."
The stars were not singing in the original book. But they were singing in Eira's version, and Eira's version was the one that mattered.
Tima's eyes closed. Her thumb slipped from her mouth. Her breathing changed — deepened, slowed, settled into the even rhythm of sleep.
Eira stopped reading. She looked at Tima, asleep against her shoulder, and then she looked at Steph, who was in the doorway watching them, and something in Eira's face was so careful and so knowing that Steph felt her chest tighten.
"She's asleep," Eira whispered.
"I can see that."
"I did it with the story."
"You did. You're very good at it."
Eira looked back at Tima. She adjusted the blanket over both of them with one hand, the kind of gesture that Steph recognised because it was her own gesture — the unconscious tucking, the making-comfortable, the small act of care that you don't plan but that your body does because your body knows what love looks like even when your mind is four years old and still working it out.
"She likes it when I read," Eira said quietly. "She goes calm."
"She trusts you."
"I know." Eira said this without pride, without surprise. As a fact. The same way she said that the sky was blue or that bins were boring. Tima trusted her. It was a known thing. It required no further discussion.
Steph moved Tima to the cot. The same careful negotiation as the night before — the lifting, the stiffening, the micro-waking, the sinking. Tima landed in the cot and curled around Hoppy and was gone.
Eira was asleep three minutes later. She fell asleep the way she did everything — suddenly, completely, without negotiation. One moment awake, the next not. Her hand hung over the edge of the bed. Her curls covered half her face.
Steph stood in the doorway.
Two children. One room. The street light. The river. The dark.
She pulled the door to.
Sunday morning was rain.
It came in from the west — soft, persistent, the kind of rain that doesn't fall so much as materialise, arriving not from the sky but from the air itself, as if the valley were sweating. It covered the windows in a fine mist and made the street outside look like something seen through frosted glass.
Steph made pancakes because it was Sunday and because Eira had declared, the moment her eyes opened, that pancakes were a constitutional right and that Sundays without them were a violation of something she hadn't named but felt very strongly about.
The kitchen was warm. The radio was on low — a Welsh-language station, voices and music drifting in and out of the cooking sounds. Tima was in the highchair, engaged in the systematic deconstruction of a pancake. She did not eat it in the normal sense. She peeled it apart, layer by layer, examined the interior with the focus of a geologist studying strata, tasted each layer separately, and then, having assessed the entire structure, ate it in three large bites.
"She does that every time," Eira said, watching from her seat at the table where she was applying maple syrup to a pancake with the enthusiasm of a painter attacking a canvas. "She has to — what's it called — investigate."
"Inspect," Steph said.
"Inspect. She has to inspect it first."
"She's thorough."
"She's weird."
"She's thorough and weird. They're not mutually exclusive."
Eira ate her pancake. Tima ate her pancake (post-inspection). The rain tapped on the window. Steph drank her tea sitting down, which felt transgressive, but it was Sunday and the children were both eating and nobody was crying and the house was warm and she was going to sit down and drink tea at the table like a human being even if it only lasted four minutes.
It lasted six. She counted.
Eira was singing. She did this sometimes — began singing without preamble or context, as if a song had been building inside her and the pressure required release. This one was a Welsh nursery rhyme from school — *Dau gi bach yn mynd i'r coed* — and she sang it softly, her voice high and clear and not quite in tune but perfectly in feeling, the way children's singing always is.
Tima was listening. She'd stopped eating (post-inspection, mid-consumption) and was watching Eira with that absolute attention, that full-self listening she did. Then she began to hum.
Not the words. She didn't have the words. Just the melody — or something close to it, a version of it, shaped by a twenty-two-month-old mouth that couldn't produce the sounds but could carry the shape. A hum that followed Eira's singing the way a shadow follows movement — not quite matching, slightly behind, but unmistakably the same thing.
Eira noticed. She didn't stop singing, but she slowed down, giving Tima more space in the melody, and Tima's hum shifted to fill it — louder now, more confident, the two voices braiding together in the steam-warm kitchen while the rain came down outside.
Steph stood at the counter with her mug and listened and didn't move. There are moments in a house — she knew this, she'd known it for four years — that don't announce themselves. They arrive in the middle of ordinary things and they don't stay long. A song. Two voices. Rain. The warmth of a kitchen and the smell of pancakes and two children alive in the same room, reaching for the same melody, finding it, holding it, letting it go.
The song ended. Eira went back to her syrup. Tima went back to her pancake.
Steph drank her tea.
The second time was quieter.
Tima was on the floor in the living room, building something out of Eira's wooden blocks. Not building, exactly — stacking. Two blocks, three blocks, a fourth placed with the concentrated precision of someone who understands that this next one is the one that matters. She got to five, and it fell. She looked at the fallen tower. She looked at Steph. She didn't cry. She didn't react at all, in fact, except to pick up the first block and begin again.
Steph was on the sofa, folding laundry. The domestic work that never ended — the clean, the fold, the put-away, the find-another-pile. She folded Eira's school jumper, a pair of small purple socks, a vest. She folded one of Tima's tops — the yellow one with the bee on it that Erik had packed — and felt the smallness of it in her hands. The cotton still warm from the dryer. The sleeves shorter than her forearm.
Tima stood up. She left the blocks and walked over to Steph — that determined, wide-legged walk — and stopped at her knees. She held her arms up.
"Mummy," she said.
And this time it was different. This time it wasn't an echo of Eira. It wasn't a borrowed word, a copied sound. It was directed — at Steph, purposefully, with eye contact, with the arms up, with the full weight of a child's request. *Pick me up. You. The one I mean. Mummy.*
Steph's hands stopped on the laundry. She looked at Tima's face — the dark eyes, the dark curls, the serious expression that was always there even when she was happy, that gravity, that oldness in a young face. She looked at the arms held up, the fingers opening and closing, the demand that was also a benediction.
She picked her up.
Tima settled onto her lap, into her, the way water settles into a cup — finding the shape, filling it, going still. She pressed her face against Steph's chest. Her hand found the zip on Steph's fleece — the same zip she'd examined on Friday evening, a lifetime ago — and held it.
Steph held her.
She held her and she didn't say *I'm not your Mummy* and she didn't say *your Papa's coming soon* and she didn't say anything at all because the moment didn't need words. The moment was the old refrain — the one that plays underneath everything, underneath the feeding and the bathing and the sock-folding and the two a.m. checks and the milk-warming and the nose-wiping and the carrying, always the carrying. The refrain that doesn't have a lyric. Just a melody. Repeating. Going round.
After lunch, Steph packed Tima's bag.
It was a particular skill, the packing of another person's child's bag. You had to return everything you'd been given — the inhaler, the sleep sack, the specific cup with the handles, Hoppy — and it was important that Hoppy was on top, visible, reachable, because the moment the bag was opened and Hoppy was not immediately apparent was the moment a twenty-two-month-old decided that Hoppy was lost forever and that life, accordingly, was over.
She folded the yellow top with the bee. She rolled the spare leggings. She put the nappies in the side pocket and the milk cup (washed, dried) in the front zip and the inhaler in its pouch. She worked with the efficiency of someone who had been packing bags for children for four years — folding with one hand while her other hand prevented Eira from adding things that did not need adding.
"This is for Tima," Eira said, holding out a drawing. It showed two figures — one tall (or tallish, Eira's sense of proportion was creative), one small — standing under a triangle that was either a mountain or a Christmas tree. Between them, a third figure: round, purple, one eye bigger than the other. Hoppy.
"That's lovely, cariad. She'll love it."
"And this." Eira held out a pine cone — collected yesterday at the market, kept in her coat pocket overnight, now slightly fluffy with lint. "It's from the market. So she remembers."
Steph took the pine cone and put it in the bag. "What else?"
Eira disappeared and returned with a biscuit wrapped in a paper towel. "For the journey."
"The journey's forty minutes."
"Forty minutes is a long time if you're small."
Steph could not argue with this. The biscuit went in.
The knock came at half one.
Steph knew it was them before she opened the door — she could hear Peter's voice through the wood, saying something to Erik that she couldn't make out but that had the cadence of mild complaint, which was Peter's default register and, she suspected, his love language.
She opened the door.
Erik stood on the step. He looked tired — the good kind of tired, the tired of physical work done and finished, the tired of a man who has spent a weekend under someone else's boiler with a Cornishman and has survived. His hair was pushed back. His coat was dusty. He smelled of cold air and engine grease.
Peter was behind him, leaning against the garden wall, hands in his pockets, looking at the street with the expression of someone who has opinions about the brickwork but is keeping them to himself.
"How was the —" Erik began.
And then Tima saw him.
She was in the hallway behind Steph — she'd been playing with a wooden spoon, the same one she'd refused to let go of yesterday morning, the one that had now become a permanent feature of her weekend — and she looked up, and she saw him, and the wooden spoon hit the floor
"Papa!"
It was not a word. It was a detonation. The whole body went into it — the arms up, the legs moving, the face breaking open into something so complete and so uncontrolled that Steph felt her own chest crack with it. Tima ran — that wide, unsteady, arms-out run — from the hallway to the door, and Erik crouched and caught her, and she hit him with the force of a small, determined planet meeting its sun, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her face in his collar and held on.
She held on the way she held Hoppy — with everything, with both hands, with the certainty that this thing was hers and that letting go was not an option.
Erik stood, lifting her. She climbed him — legs wrapping around his waist, arms around his neck, face pressed into the space behind his ear. She made a sound — not a word, not a cry. A sound. The sound of something that had been stretched across a weekend and was now snapping back to its original shape.
"Hello, love," Erik said. His voice was thick. His arms were tight around her. He looked at Steph over Tima's head and she saw the thing she always saw in that look — the gratitude that was bigger than the word, the knowledge that what she'd done over the weekend was not babysitting, was not a favour, was something that didn't have a word but that they both understood.
"She's been wonderful," Steph said.
"Was she —"
"She was perfect. She was completely Tima."
Peter appeared in the doorway. "Tea?" he said, hopeful.
"We should crack on," Erik said.
"One cup," Peter said. "The road's not going anywhere.”
"One cup," Steph agreed, because she could see that Peter wanted one minute of warmth and a kitchen and the small grace of being somewhere that wasn't under a boiler, and she understood that need because she felt it every day.
But Erik shook his head gently. "We should get back. She'll want her own bed tonight."
Tima had lifted her face from Erik's neck. She was looking at Steph now, from the safety of her father's arms, and her expression was the one Steph knew best — the watching one. The one that took things in and held them and didn't let them go.
Peter shrugged. "Right then. Another time."
Eira arrived at the door with the solemnity of a diplomat.
"Tima," she said. "I have to say goodbye now."
Tima looked at her from Erik's hip.
"I put a drawing in your bag. And a pine cone. Don't eat the pine cone."
Tima pointed at Eira. "Eira," she said. Clear. Both syllables.
"Yes. I'm Eira. We established this."
"Eira," Tima said again, and reached out one hand — the gesture of someone who wants to touch something before it goes, who understands that going is what things do and touching is what you do before.
Eira took her hand. She held it for a moment. Then she leaned in and kissed Tima's fingers — a gesture so adult, so precise, so unlike anything a four-year-old should know how to do that Steph felt the air leave her lungs.
"Bye, Tima."
"Bye Eira."
"Bye Hoppy."
Tima held up Hoppy. Eira kissed his nose.
"Right," Peter said from the wall. "That's enough, or I'm going to need the cup of tea after all and none of us want that."
Erik smiled. He shifted Tima on his hip. Steph handed him the bag — the bag with the inhaler and the milk cup and the yellow top and the drawing and the pine cone and the biscuit for the journey.
"Thank you," Erik said.
"Stop thanking me."
He nodded. He turned toward the car. Tima was on his hip, facing backward — facing Steph — and as they walked down the path she kept her gaze on the door. On Steph. That steady, even gaze.
"Hiya," she said.
Which was also goodbye. Because at twenty-two months, the coming and the going were the same word, the same wave, the same gesture of: *I see you. You're there. That's enough.*
"Hiya, bach," Steph said.
The car door opened. Tima went in. The car door closed. Peter got in the passenger side with the deliberate movements of a man who has been folding himself into too-small cars for forty years and will continue to do so until either he or the cars give out. Erik got in. The engine started.
Steph stood in the doorway. Eira stood beside her, Eira's hand in hers.
The car pulled away. The brake lights. The corner. Gone.
The house was quiet.
It was the particular quiet that follows children — not silence, but the memory of noise. The air still held the shape of them. The cushion-nest was partially disassembled in the living room. The wooden spoon was on the hallway floor. A small sock — the other one, the match to Friday's — was under the sofa, discovered too late, and Steph picked it up and held it for a moment before putting it on the radiator. She'd give it back next time.
The travel cot was still up in Eira's room. She'd take it down later. Or tomorrow. Or she'd leave it up, the way she sometimes did, because there would be a next time, and a time after that, and the cot was as much a fixture of this house now as the mushroom lamp or the fairy lights or the stone on the kitchen windowsill.
Eira was in the living room, quiet for once, rearranging the remaining cushions into something new. Not a nest this time. A tower, maybe. Or a wall. She worked in silence, which was unusual for Eira, who normally narrated her own construction projects with the running commentary of a sports broadcaster.
Steph stood in the kitchen. She touched the rose quartz on the windowsill. She looked out at the rain, which was lighter now, thinning, the afternoon opening up behind it.
"Mummy?" Eira called from the living room.
"Yes, cariad."
"When is Tima coming back?"
Steph looked at the small sock on the radiator. She looked at the spoon on the floor. She looked at the space in the house where the weekend had been — the bath-time chaos, the puppet show, the morning hum of two voices finding the same melody, the word *Mummy* said twice by a child who didn't know what it meant but knew exactly who it was for.
"Soon," she said.
"How soon?"
"Soon enough.”
The house settled. The radiator ticked. The rain thinned to mist. Somewhere in the valley, a car was driving north with a sleeping child in the back and a hippo in her arms and a pine cone in the bag and a biscuit for the journey and a drawing of two figures under a tree.
Eira went back to her cushions.
Steph stood in the kitchen and let the quiet come.
And underneath the quiet — underneath the rain, underneath the ticking, underneath the ordinary Sunday afternoon of a house in Ty Sign — the refrain continued. Not a song. Not words. Just the thing itself. The old, old melody of holding and letting go and holding again. The loop. The carrying. The love that repeats and repeats and never resolves because it was never meant to. It was only ever meant to go on.
*An old refrain — not the words, but the melody underneath. The one that plays when no one is singing. The one the house knows by heart.*