She climbed onto him. Not gracefully — toddlers do not climb gracefully, they climb the way they do everything, with the full commitment of their weight and the absolute faith that the surface beneath them will hold. She clambered across his chest, one knee in his ribs, one hand grabbing his ear for balance, and then she was there — lying on top of him, her cheek against his sternum, her body small and warm and heavy in the way that only sleeping-adjacent children are heavy, as if gravity increases by a factor of three once the eyes start closing.

"Night night, Tad," she murmured.

"Nos da, daffodil."

Her breathing changed. That's how you knew with Tima — not the eyes, which could fool you, staying open long after the rest of her had surrendered, but the breathing. It slowed. It deepened. It found that particular rhythm — the in-and-out of a child who has finally, reluctantly, agreed to leave the day behind.

Papa held her. His hand on her back, feeling the small ribs expand and contract, the machinery of her working its quiet, reliable cycle. The room was dim. The curtain was drawn but the summer light leaked through — August in South Wales, the light that lingered past nine, that clung to the edges of the day like a guest who doesn't want to leave.

He was tired. The day had been long in the way that days with a two-and-a-half-year-old are long — not with events but with attention, with the sustained, high-resolution focus that parenting a small child requires, the constant scan, the perpetual readiness, the body tuned to the frequency of another person's needs as if his nervous system had been recalibrated at her birth and now operated on her signal rather than his own.

He closed his eyes. Tima's weight on his chest. The warmth of her. The sound of her breathing and, behind it, the sound of the valley — the distant murmur of the Ebbw somewhere below, the birds settling, the particular hush that Crosskeys made at dusk when the houses tucked themselves into the hillside and the trees on the ridge stood black against the pale sky.

He fell asleep before she did.

The dream was old.

It was not the kind of dream that arrives as narrative — no beginning, no middle, no sequence of events that the sleeping mind assembles into story. It was the other kind. The kind that arrives as sensation. As a photograph held underwater, its edges dissolving but its centre still sharp, still insisting on itself.