Part One: The Cliffs
The bed was too big for a man and a girl, but they filled it anyway.
Tima had colonised the centre — the way she always did, the way small children claim territory without negotiation, their bodies spreading outward from wherever they land until the available surface is theirs and the adults are pressed to the edges like footnotes. She lay diagonal across the duvet, one leg thrown out at an angle that defied the structural limitations of a two-and-a-half-year-old's hip joint, her dark curls fanned across the pillow in a pattern that looked, if you squinted, like a weather system seen from above. Hoppy was face-down beside her. He'd had a long day.
Papa lay on his side at the edge, watching her.
She was not asleep. She was in that state — the state that only toddlers truly master — where the body has committed to being horizontal but the mind has not yet received the memo. She was talking. Not to Papa, not to Hoppy, not to anyone in particular. She was talking to the ceiling, or to the room, or to whatever audience exists in the imagination of a child who has been told it is bedtime and has decided that bedtime is a suggestion rather than a fact.
"Hoppy doesn't want sleep," she announced, pressing the hippo's face into the pillow and then lifting it again. "He wants a story."
"Hoppy's had three stories."
"He wants four."
"Nobody needs four stories."
"Hoppy does. He's special."
Papa smiled. She'd picked that up from Eira — the special defence, the trump card that four-year-olds deploy with the certainty of a barrister citing precedent. What Eira said, Tima learned. What Tima learned, Tima used. The transmission was flawless and constant, a small-scale cultural exchange between two girls who shared no blood but shared everything else.
"Hoppy can have his fourth story tomorrow," Papa said.
Tima considered this. She rolled onto her side, facing him, and brought Hoppy up between them so that the hippo's one remaining eye — loose, purple, threatening to detach at any moment — was looking directly into Papa's face.
"Hoppy says okay."
"That's very generous of Hoppy."
She smiled — that smile, the one that started at the corners and moved inward, the wrong direction, as if the smile was arriving from somewhere else and her face was simply the place it landed. Storm blue eyes. Dark lashes. The face that contained, somehow, both of them — her mother's bones and her father's attention, the geometry of one and the stillness of the other.