"There. Done. See? Not in your eyes."

Papa leaned against the bathroom doorframe. Peter was downstairs making tea, the kettle's whistle rising through the floor. The bathroom was small and steamy and the two girls were in the tub, pink and wet and laughing at something that only they found funny, some private joke between them, some fragment of a shared language that existed only in the space between their faces when they looked at each other and understood, without words, that they were each other's.

The big bed.

Both girls, clean and pyjama'd, installed in the centre of the bed that was, by now, more theirs than Papa's. Tima on the left. Eira on the right. Hoppy between them, his one eye facing the ceiling, his role as the bed's mediator and protector unchanged by the addition of a second child.

Papa sat on the edge. Peter leaned in the doorway, tea in hand, the fire from the grate downstairs sending a warm amber glow up the stairwell.

"Story," Eira said. Not a request.

"One," Papa said.

"One LONG one."

"One medium one."

Eira negotiated with her eyes. Papa held firm. Eira conceded. This was the rhythm of their exchanges — Eira pushing, Papa holding, the compromise arriving at a point that both of them knew was the correct point but that required the negotiation because the negotiation itself was the thing, the dance, the proof that care was being taken.

Papa told a story. Not a Sweden story — not tonight. Tonight it was a valley story, a forest story, something about a fox who lived under a bridge and who collected things that the river brought — not treasures, not gold, but sounds. The sound of rain on water. The sound of a child laughing upstream. The sound of a stone being thrown and the splash it made and the rings that spread outward, carrying the throw's intention into the wider world. The fox collected these sounds and kept them in a hollow beneath the roots and on quiet nights, when the valley was asleep, the fox would take them out and play them, one by one, and the valley would hear itself being remembered.

Eira was asleep before the fox reached the second sound. Her breathing had changed — the sudden, absolute transition of a child who has been running on fumes for the last hour and whose body, having received a horizontal surface and a warm bed, has simply switched off.

Tima was still awake. Her eyes were open — those storm blue eyes — and she was looking at Papa with the look she gave him sometimes, the look that was not a child looking at a parent but something older and quieter, the look of a person who knows something without knowing how they know it.

"Tad?"

"Yes, daffodil?"

"Was the hill real?"

"Which hill?"

"Your hill. The one with the grass and the fire."

"Yes, love. It was real."