Papa watched them. He watched from the dartboard, a dart in his hand, the pub around him, the music playing, Peter beside him arguing with the scoring — Peter, who would argue with a clock about the time — and the girls at the table, drawing simultaneously, their heads bent at the same angle, their crayons moving with the same focused intensity, the two of them so close that their elbows touched and neither noticed because the touching was as natural as breathing, as ordinary as the air between their faces, as unremarkable and as essential as anything could be.

He threw the dart. It landed in the twenty.

"Show-off," Peter said.

The evening came down like a curtain, the slow August descent, the light fading from the pub windows in stages — gold, then amber, then the particular blue-grey of a valley dusk. They finished their pints. The girls finished their drawings — Eira had produced a portrait of Peter that featured a walking stick, an enormous head, and the word PETR across the top in letters that were creative in their spelling and confident in their size. Tima had produced a field of colour that she announced was "the hill, Tad, with the fire," and Papa folded it carefully and put it in his pocket where it would stay, through washes and years and the things that years bring, until the paper was soft as cloth and the colours had faded to ghosts and the drawing was no longer a drawing but an artifact, a relic, a thing the world would not know the value of and that he would know the value of forever.

They walked home. The street was quiet. The houses glowed from within, each window a small rectangle of warmth in the gathering dark. Tima was on Papa's back again, her arms around his neck, her cheek against his shoulder. Eira walked between Peter's legs, holding both his hands, being swung forward with every other step, her laughter the only sound on the street apart from their footsteps and the distant, eternal murmur of the Ebbw below.

Home. The cottage. The door opening onto the hall that smelled of stone and the herbs from the garden and the particular domesticity of a house that has been lived in and loved in and that holds, in its walls and its floors and its particular creak on the third stair, the accumulated evidence of every day it has contained.

Bath. Not a long bath — the girls were too tired for a long bath, the day having used them up the way good days use children up, completely and well. Eira and Tima in the tub together, the water warm, the bubbles present because bubbles were non-negotiable, Eira washing Tima's hair with the careful, proprietary attention of a child who has decided that another child's hygiene is within her jurisdiction.

"Hold still, Tima."

"It's in my eyes."

"It's not in your eyes. I'm being careful."

"EIRA."