She turned her head. The storm blue eyes found him. The smile arrived — slow, sleepy, the sunrise version of a smile, the one that builds from nothing and ends with the whole face involved.

"Bore da, Tad," she said. And then, without removing her hand from his face: "You were sleeping."

"I was."

"For a long time."

"Was I?"

"Yes. I counted."

"How high did you count?"

She considered. "All the way."

Papa laughed — the particular laugh of a parent whose child has said something so perfectly, so completely itself, that the only response is joy. He scooped her up, one arm under her, lifting her the way he'd lifted her since she was born — the full-body scoop, the commitment of muscle, the motion that was, by now, as automatic as breathing. She went with it, loose-limbed and warm, her arms wrapping around his neck, her face pressed into the space beneath his ear that was hers and had always been hers, the exact spot where her cheek fit against his skin as if the spot had been built for the purpose.

"Breakfast?" he said.

"Pancakes."

"We don't have pancakes."

"Toast."

"We have toast."

"Toast with jam. And Hoppy wants toast too."

"Hoppy is a hippo. Hippos don't eat toast."

She pulled back to look at him with an expression of such withering scepticism that he almost apologised. "Hoppy eats everything, Tad. You know that."

He did know that. Hoppy's diet, as documented by Tima over the past six months, included toast, porridge, clouds, the colour yellow, and — on one memorable occasion — an entire imaginary fish that Tima had caught from the arm of the sofa using a spoon and a length of string.

They went downstairs. The cottage was cool — stone walls, low ceilings, the thermal character of a building that had been absorbing the valley's temperature for two hundred years and had settled on slightly chilly as its default setting, regardless of season. The stairs creaked in the usual places. The kitchen was as he'd left it — the plate from last night, the teacup in the sink, the window looking out onto the small back garden where the herbs were going wild and the grass needed cutting and the morning light lay across the stone wall like something painted there.

Papa made toast. The kettle went on. Tima sat at the table in her pyjamas with Hoppy propped against the milk bottle, his one eye facing the window as if he too wanted to know what the weather was doing.

"Is Peter coming today?" Tima asked, swinging her legs.

"I don't know, love. Peter's been at Steph's."

"With Eira?"

"With Eira."

"I want Eira to come."

"Maybe she will."

"I want Eira to come now."

"Eira doesn't come on command, Tima. She's not a bus."

Tima absorbed this. "Eira is better than a bus."