Papa carried her backpack slung over one shoulder. Peter walked with both hands behind his back, whistling low through his teeth—an old tune, half-forgotten, that the evening seemed to finish for him.

"Do you think the Ebbw goes to sleep?" Tima asked without looking up.

Peter smiled. "Not quite. Rivers rest different. They carry dreams."

"What kind of dreams?" she asked, her voice hushed with the dusk.

"The kind you don't remember in the morning," Papa said. "But they still change you."

They walked the final stretch in silence until the lights of the cottage came into view, golden through the windows. A curl of smoke from the chimney twisted into the evening air. It looked, from where they stood, like a painting—the sort you see in a gallery and think: someone was happy there.

Inside: boots off at the door. The comforting creak of the floorboards. Soup warming on the stove, its steam catching the fading light.

Tima curled up on the sofa with Stick-Stick still in hand, nodding as she blinked heavy eyes. Her boots sat by the door, still caked with mud from the riverbank, and she'd left a trail of tiny leaf fragments from the mat to the cushion.

Peter sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, rubbing his knees and muttering something about needing new joints. "Worth it, though," he added to no one, and meant it.

Papa ladled soup into bowls, his motions slow, deliberate, content. Through the kitchen window, the last thin line of light lay along the ridge like a thread pulled taut—and then it was gone, and the valley settled into night.

Later, after the dishes were washed and the fire stoked low, Papa carried Tima up the stairs. She was half asleep already, her words thick with dreams.

"Papa…" she murmured.

"Yes, love?"

"The Ebbw liked us today."

He paused on the landing, brushing her hair back, and kissed her forehead.

"I think it always has."

Downstairs, Peter sat alone by the fire with his tea gone cold. He didn't reach for his book. He didn't turn on the lamp. He just sat, listening to the house settle around him—the creak of pipes, the whisper of wind at the eaves, and somewhere beneath it all, faint but certain, the river. Still singing. Still carrying names and stories and the small, fierce weight of a day that none of them would ever quite forget.