Tima was on Steph's lap. She didn't shout. She didn't squirm. She was perfectly, absolutely still — that watchful stillness that was so much a part of who she was, the capacity to attend to something with her whole self. Her eyes followed the puppets. Her mouth was slightly open. One hand rested on Steph's arm, the fingers occasionally tightening when the dragon roared or the sheep squeaked, but she didn't look away. Not once. The whole ten minutes, she watched without blinking, as if the puppet show was the most important thing that had ever been shown to her and she owed it the courtesy of her complete attention.

When it ended and the puppets took their bow, Eira leaped up and clapped with the violence of genuine appreciation. Tima clapped too — she brought her hands together in that off-centre toddler clap, the one where the hands don't quite meet in the middle — and then she looked at Steph and smiled.

It was the smile that got you. Not the big laugh, not the shriek — Tima's power was in the smile. It arrived slowly, it started in her eyes, and when it reached her mouth it was so full and so certain that it made you feel like you'd been chosen. Like whatever you'd just done — in this case, sitting still and holding her — was exactly the right thing, and she was telling you so.

"Again?" she said.

"I don't think they do it again, bach."

"Again."

"Maybe next year."

Tima looked back at the puppet theatre, now empty, the felt curtains drawn. She pointed.

"Gone," she said. The same word she'd used when Erik left last night. The same flat acceptance. Things go. That's what things do.

"Gone," Steph agreed. "But we remembered it. That's what matters."

It happened by the carol singers.

They were standing near the bandstand — Steph with Tima on her hip, Eira holding Steph's free hand — listening to the brass ensemble play O Holy Night, the notes hanging in the cold air with the kind of resonance that brass makes in winter, bright and ancient and full of something that doesn't need a name. There were other families around them, other children, the whole small crowd drawn together by the music and the fairy lights and the Welsh cakes and the particular magic of a December morning in a park that has been holding its town for a hundred and twenty years.

Eira tugged Steph's hand. "Mummy, look!" She was pointing at a booth they hadn't seen — a woman making candyfloss, the pink cloud spinning on its stick like something from a circus.

"Mummy, can I have some? Can I?"

And Tima, on Steph's hip, turned her face toward Steph — close, a few inches away, so close that Steph could feel her breath — and said:

"Mummy."