"Everything. On summer days — the long summer days, when the sun doesn't set until ten at night — I'd lie in the grass and watch the sky. Just lie there. The grass smelled like… like warmth, like the sun had eaten the grass and the grass was breathing it back. You could hear the crickets. The bees. The wind going through the trees at the bottom. And the sky was so big — big the way the sky is in places where there's nothing to interrupt it — just blue, forever, in every direction."

He paused. The memory was there — not painful, not weighted, just there, vivid and warm, the kind of memory that survives because it is simple and because simple things, it turns out, are the hardest to destroy.

"And in autumn," he said, "we'd burn the grass."

"Burn it?" Eira sat up. "Actually burn it?"

"Actually burn it. Everyone did. It was a thing — before winter, you'd burn the old grass to clear the ground for spring. Not a wildfire. A controlled burn. My father would set it and we'd stand back and watch it go — the flames moving through the grass in a line, crackling, the smoke rising straight up into the October sky. And after, the hill was black, completely black, and it smelled like — I don't know. Like endings. Like something making room for something else."

Tima, quiet through all of this, said: "Did the grass come back?"

Papa kissed the top of her head. "Always," he said. "It always came back."

Part Five: The Philanthropic

The walk down was easier than the walk up. It always is — gravity doing the work that the legs did on the way up, the body leaning back instead of forward, the pace quicker, looser, the rhythm of descent. The forest closed around them and then opened again and then the houses appeared below, the rooftops of Pontywaun and Crosskeys arranged along the valley floor like boats moored in a harbour.

Eira and Tima walked ahead. Eira was talking — she was always talking, the narrative unbroken, a continuous stream of observation and opinion and the occasional proclamation that required no response but received one anyway because Tima, walking beside her, holding her hand, said "yes" and "okay" and "look" with the reliable enthusiasm of a person who has found her person and whose person can do no wrong.

Tima was tired. Papa could see it — the way her steps shortened, the way her shoulders dropped, the way she leaned into Eira's grip rather than walking beside it. The hill had cost her. Every hill cost her. The condition sat in her chest and levied its tax and she paid it without complaint, the way she paid everything, with the quiet mathematics of a child who has learned to budget her breath.