Not a question. Not a shout. Just the word. Clear, soft, shaped by a mouth that was still learning how to shape things. She'd heard Eira say it and she'd repeated it, the way she repeated everything Eira said, the way she was always learning from the girl beside her, absorbing her vocabulary like water into sand.

She didn't know what it meant. Or she knew exactly what it meant, in the way that children know things — not through definition but through feeling, through the body's understanding of who holds you and feeds you and carries you through the market on a cold Saturday morning with your hippo in one hand and your world reduced to the circle of someone's arms.

Steph didn't correct her. She didn't say *I'm not your Mummy, cariad*. She didn't explain. She just breathed — one breath, held for a beat longer than the music required — and shifted Tima higher on her hip and said:

"I know, love. I see it."

And they went to get the candyfloss. And the morning continued. And the word hung in the air the way the brass notes did — not fading, not resolving, just present. A sound made. A truth touched. An old refrain that nobody had written but that everyone, in the park, in the valley, in the long repeating history of women holding children who needed holding, already knew.

The afternoon was the colour of sleep.

They walked home from the market along the canal path, Eira's candyfloss reduced to a sticky pink residue on her chin and both hands, Tima dozing in the pushchair with Hoppy on her chest and her hat (the useless one, the perched one) finally removed and resting in her lap like a collapsed souffle. The canal was flat and dark under the December sky, and somewhere above the valley Twmbarlwm sat in the mist like something waiting.

Steph pushed the chair with one hand and held Eira's sticky hand with the other and thought about nothing in particular, which was a luxury she so rarely had that when it arrived she noticed it the way you notice the first warm day after winter — with a kind of startled gratitude.

They got home. Tima was transferred from pushchair to sofa without waking (a miracle — the child had the motion sensor of a bomb disposal technician). Eira was sent to wash her hands, a process that took fifteen minutes and resulted in the bathroom tap running continuously while she forgot what she'd come in for and began examining her own reflection with the intense scrutiny of a woman about to deliver a keynote address.