"Bottle caps," Papa repeated, grinning. "We were convinced they were valuable. We'd walk through the streets, the parks, down by the lake, crouched over, staring at the ground, collecting every bottle cap we found. Sofia kept them in a tin. I kept mine in my pockets. We'd compare at the end of the day — who found the most, who found the best. The best was always the one that was the most unusual. A foreign brand. A colour you hadn't seen before. A cap that was bent in an interesting way."

Tima's face was serious. "Were they valuable?"

"Not to anyone else. But to us they were treasure. Real treasure. The kind that's valuable because you found it, not because someone told you it was worth something."

"Like kattguld," he added. "Fool's gold. Pyrite. We'd find it sometimes, by the lake, in the streams. Little flakes of gold in the sand and the rocks. We'd fill our pockets. We thought we were rich."

"Were you?" Tima asked.

Papa looked at her. At the storm blue eyes. At the dark curls. At the face that held everything he had ever lost and everything he had ever found.

"Yes," he said. "We were."

Peter was quiet. He was listening, from behind his tea, with the particular quality of attention that Peter gave to things that mattered — not the active listening of a man trying to gather information, but the receptive stillness of a friend who understands that some stories are being told not for the listener but for the teller, and the teller is a man who needs, sometimes, to remember that he had a childhood, that the childhood contained joy, that the joy was real even if everything that came after tried to erase it.

"Tell them about the hill," Peter said.

Papa looked at him. "You know about the hill?"

"You told me. Once. Late. After the girls were asleep. You'd had a whisky."

"I'd had three whiskies."

"Tell them."

Papa shifted, settling Tima more comfortably against his chest. Eira had come down from Peter's shoulders and was lying on the blanket, her chin on her fists, her face open and waiting.

"There was a hill," Papa said. "Behind our house in Lit — the village north of Östersund where we lived for a while. A yellow radhus, a terraced house, with a small garden. And behind it, a hill. Not a big hill. Not a mountain. Just a hill, covered in grass, the kind of grass that's thick and long in summer and turns gold in autumn."

"What did you do on it?"