The picnic happened on the grass. Peter spread the tartan blanket — the big one, the one that had been in the boot of his car since approximately the beginning of time and that smelled of car and grass and something faintly like Peter himself, the particular blend of tea and boot leather and the outdoors that was his signature as surely as a cologne, which he would never wear. The bags were opened. The contents were arranged.

"Right," Peter said, surveying his work with the satisfaction of a man who has provisioned adequately. "Sandwiches — ham for the grown-ups, cheese for the commanders. Apples. Crisps. Biscuits for afters. Flask of tea. Flask of squash. Questions?"

"I want a biscuit first," Eira said.

"That's not a question, that's a demand."

"Please can I have a biscuit first?"

"Better. No. Sandwich first."

The girls ate. The adults ate. The food was simple and correct in the way that picnic food is always correct — the bread slightly compressed from the bag, the butter uneven, the ham folded rather than placed, the apple with the small bruise that proved it was real — and the eating was conducted in the particular style of outdoor eating with children, which is to say that approximately sixty percent of the food entered the intended mouths and the remaining forty percent was distributed across the blanket, the grass, and — in Hoppy's case — his remaining eye.

Papa lay back on the blanket. The sky above was doing its August performance — clouds building and dissolving, the sun appearing and disappearing, the light shifting across the hilltop like a hand moving across a face. Tima sat beside him, her legs crossed, her sandwich half-eaten, her attention split between the food and a beetle that was making its way across the blanket with the slow determination of a creature that has somewhere to be and does not care that it is crossing a tartan landscape populated by giants.

"Tell a story, Tad," she said, not looking at him, her eyes on the beetle.

"What kind of story?"

"A Sweden story."

Eira, who had been attempting to climb Peter's back while he sat cross-legged eating his sandwich, stopped mid-ascent. "I want a Sweden story too."

Peter, with a child hanging from his shoulders: "Go on then, lad. Give them a Sweden story."

Papa watched the beetle. He watched Tima watching the beetle. And something in the watching opened a door — the way it did sometimes, the way certain moments of quietness and warmth and the right kind of light could open a door inside him that led back, that led to the place before the white room and the towels and the silence, the place where Sweden was not a wound but a country, not a grief but a childhood.