He didn't know. The dream didn't explain itself. It never did. It simply arrived, offered its few seconds of warmth, and withdrew — leaving him not with sadness, exactly, but with the particular ache of a man who knows what holding feels like because he was held, once, before the holding stopped.

He held Tima tighter.

She stirred, murmured something that was not a word but was more than silence, and pressed her face deeper into his chest, and the weight of her was the answer to the dream's question, and the answer was: because this is what it is for. The holding. This is what it is for.

Part Two: Bore Da

A hand landed on his face.

Not a slap — Tima did not slap, she lacked the motor coordination for deliberate violence and the temperament for accidental cruelty — but a placement. A flat, open-palmed, matter-of-fact placement of a small hand across his nose and mouth, the gesture of a child who has rolled over in her sleep and whose arm, operating on its own authority, has decided that Papa's face is a reasonable place to rest.

Papa woke. The hand was warm and slightly damp and smelled of the soap from last night's bath — the lavender soap, the one Steph had given them, the one that came from the shop in Newport and that Papa privately suspected was not entirely soap, that it contained something else, some herb or intention or whatever it was that Steph put into things when she made them, the quality that turned her products from objects into — what had Peter called them? — small spells for people who don't know they need one.

He opened his eyes. Tima had rolled. She was on her back now, her arm flung across his face, her body arranged in the shape of a starfish — or a compass rose — every limb pointing in a different direction, claiming the maximum possible area of mattress. Hoppy had been pushed to the edge and was balanced on the precipice of the pillow, his one eye staring at the ceiling with the resigned expression of a toy who has accepted that proximity to Tima means a lifetime of being flung, dropped, posted behind sofas, and loved with a ferocity that leaves marks.

She was awake. He could tell because her eyes were open and tracking the light — the morning light, the August light that came through the gap in the curtains and threw a bright stripe across the bed. She was watching the stripe the way she watched everything — with that particular intensity, that full-bodied attention that made her look not like a child observing light but like a scientist conducting an experiment in which the variable was the world and the hypothesis was that the world was interesting. The hypothesis was always confirmed.

"Bore da, daffodil," Papa said, his voice muffled by her hand.