Papa set the toast down — cut into triangles, always triangles, the muscle memory of Peter's hands performing Peter's geometry, the habit inherited from a man who taught him that toast was not merely bread but a small, daily act of care whose shape mattered. Jam on one triangle, butter on another, the third one plain because Tima liked to decide and changing her mind was part of the deciding.

They ate. The kitchen was quiet except for the sound of toast being eaten by a toddler, which is not quiet at all — it is the sound of crumbs being distributed across every available surface by a creature who eats with her entire body, her mouth, her hands, her elbows, even her eyebrows involved in the consumption, the toast less eaten than experienced.

"Can we go outside?" Tima said, mid-bite.

"After breakfast."

"This is after breakfast."

"This is during breakfast."

"It's nearly after."

Papa sipped his coffee. She was right, technically. She was always right, technically. She had inherited his capacity for finding the angle that made the desired conclusion logically defensible, and she deployed it with the frequency and precision of a child who had discovered that adults, when confronted with sound reasoning, sometimes conceded.

The playground was close. Everything was close — that was the nature of Pontywaun, of this particular cluster of cottages on Hawthorn Place, the terraced houses connected like carriages on a train, each one slightly different from the next in the way that siblings are different, the same bones but different curtains. Their cottage had a small front garden — a patch, really, where Papa had put in herbs and a few flowers, the kind of garden that looks accidental but is not, the kind that a man who learned from Peter tends with the patience of someone who knows that growing things is its own reward. And a small back garden — a rectangle of grass, the stone wall, the bins, the view uphill toward the treeline where the forest began.

Just past the next cottage — Mrs Griffiths' cottage, the woman who watched from her window with the genial suspicion of a person who has lived in the same house for fifty years and considers all subsequent arrivals to be newcomers regardless of how long they stay — was the playground. Small. A swing. A sandbox. One of those spring-mounted animals that rock back and forth, its paint faded to the colour of mild enthusiasm. A bench for the parents. The ground was that rubbery surface that playgrounds had started using, the spongy black-and-green material that was supposed to cushion falls and instead collected water and made everything slightly damp.