Tima went for the sandbox. Of course she did — the sandbox was hers, had been hers since she was old enough to sit in it, the way certain places belong to certain people not through ownership but through the quality of attention they bring to them. She sat in the sand and began the work — the serious, concentrated, endlessly absorbing work of moving sand from one place to another, of filling a bucket and emptying it, of sifting the grains through her fingers and watching them fall. Hoppy was installed on the edge of the sandbox, his face pointed outward, the sentinel on the perimeter.

Papa sat on the bench with his coffee. The morning was warm already — August, the sun climbing above the ridge, the light falling through the trees at the angle that made everything look like a postcard of itself. A blackbird was singing from Mrs Griffiths' hedge. Somewhere down the hill, a car started. Somewhere further, the valley held its breath between one hour and the next.

His pocket buzzed.

The phone — the old Motorola, the grey brick with the cracked screen and the battery that lasted three days because it did nothing except make calls and receive texts, the phone of a man who had no interest in the internet and considerable interest in not being reachable by anyone except the people who mattered. He flipped it open.

Peter.

"Bore da, butt."

Papa smiled. Peter's butt — the South Welsh punctuation mark, the word that meant mate and friend and the person I'm talking to all at once, deployed with the warmth of a man who'd adopted Papa into his vocabulary the way he'd adopted him into his life, completely and without ceremony.

"Bore da. You're up early."

"Up early? I've been up since half five. Eira decided that dawn is a suggestion and five-thirty is a fact."

Papa laughed. "She gets that from Steph."

"She gets everything from Steph. Including the ability to make me do things before coffee." A pause. The sound of a kettle in the background, and a smaller voice — Eira's voice, bright and insistent, saying something about shoes. "Listen. Steph's been called in. They're short of staff — someone on the ward's off sick, they need a pair of hands."

"So she's working?"

"She's working. Which means I've got our little general here, and the little general has decided —" the word was loaded with the particular emphasis of a man who has been informed, not consulted — "that today is a family day. Her words. She wants Tima. She wants the forest. She wants — what was it, Eira?"

The smaller voice, closer now, louder: "I want to go UP."

Peter returned. "She wants to go up. The forest drive. Cwmcarn. Shall I bring a picnic?"