Tima looked up at the ceiling, as if the answer might be written there. "Ummm... cooch."

"Green is gwiill—"

"Gwiilth!" Tima said, landing on it with the triumphant finality of someone planting a flag.

Steph stopped filming. The clip was forty seconds, maybe less. It would live on that phone for years — through cracked screens and lost chargers and drawer burials and recoveries — and every time Steph watched it she would hear what the camera couldn't capture: the warmth of the room, the rain on the window, the particular weight of a Saturday afternoon when someone else's child is yours for the weekend and you are teaching her your language and she is getting every answer wrong and it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter at all.

Eira appeared in the doorway. "We want to watch Peppa now."

"Who's we?"

"Me and Tima. We decided."

Tima looked at Eira. She looked at Steph. She held out her hand for the pacifier.

Steph gave it back. Tima put it in her mouth with the satisfied air of someone who has completed important work and is now ready for leisure.

They watched Peppa.

Saturday evening folded into itself the way evenings with small children do — incrementally, through a series of tasks that feel both endless and somehow too fast, as if time were accordion-pleated, expanding and contracting according to rules that only children understand.

Dinner was pasta (Eira's request) with butter and cheese (Tima's requirement — she rejected all forms of sauce with the unwavering conviction of a food critic who has seen enough). Eira ate hers with a fork. Tima ate hers with her hands, one piece at a time, examining each tube of penne before committing to it. She arranged three of them on her tray in a line, studied the arrangement, rearranged them, studied again, and then ate them in reverse order.

"She's so weird," Eira said, watching this.

"She's not weird. She's careful."

"She's carefully weird."

Steph laughed. It was the kind of observation that could only come from a four-year-old — precise, unhesitant, delivered without malice or filter. Eira didn't mean weird as an insult. She meant it as a fact, the way you'd say someone was tall or left-handed. Tima was carefully weird. It was accurate.

After dinner: bath again (smoother this time — Tima had figured out the duck protocol and Eira had accepted the principle of communal waterfowl with reluctant grace). Then pyjamas, teeth (Eira's easy, Tima's a negotiation — she clamped her mouth shut and looked at Steph with the defiant dignity of a political prisoner), and the winding-down.

Eira read to Tima.