This was a thing they did — not every time Tima stayed, but most times. Eira would choose a book, climb into the cushion-nest she'd built (or, tonight, sit on the end of her bed with a blanket over her knees), and read. She couldn't really read yet — she was four, she knew her letters, she could sound out some words — but she knew the stories. She'd heard them enough to carry the shape of them, and she'd fill in what she couldn't read with what she remembered, and where she couldn't remember she'd invent, and the inventions were always better.

Tonight it was a book about a fox who lived in a tree.

"The fox had a very big house," Eira read, holding the book open on her lap so Tima could see the pictures. She turned the page. "And in the house there was a — a — Mummy, what's that word?"

"Kitchen."

"Kitchen. And in the kitchen there was a cake. And the fox said —" She looked at the picture of the fox. "He said, 'This is the best cake in all the land.'"

Tima leaned against Eira's arm, looking at the pictures. She pointed at the fox.

"Da."

"That's the fox. He's the main character. He's telling the story."

"Da." She pointed at the cake.

"That's his cake. It's chocolate."

Tima put her thumb in her mouth. Her eyes were closing — the slow, resistant blink of a child fighting the inevitable. She leaned further into Eira, her head against Eira's shoulder, her weight shifting toward sleep.

Eira kept reading. She turned the pages more slowly now, her voice dropping to match Tima's fading attention. "And the fox looked out of his window... and he saw... all the stars... and the stars were singing..."

The stars were not singing in the original book. But they were singing in Eira's version, and Eira's version was the one that mattered.

Tima's eyes closed. Her thumb slipped from her mouth. Her breathing changed — deepened, slowed, settled into the even rhythm of sleep.

Eira stopped reading. She looked at Tima, asleep against her shoulder, and then she looked at Steph, who was in the doorway watching them, and something in Eira's face was so careful and so knowing that Steph felt her chest tighten.

"She's asleep," Eira whispered.

"I can see that."

"I did it with the story."

"You did. You're very good at it."

Eira looked back at Tima. She adjusted the blanket over both of them with one hand, the kind of gesture that Steph recognised because it was her own gesture — the unconscious tucking, the making-comfortable, the small act of care that you don't plan but that your body does because your body knows what love looks like even when your mind is four years old and still working it out.

"She likes it when I read," Eira said quietly. "She goes calm."

"She trusts you."