"I know." Eira said this without pride, without surprise. As a fact. The same way she said that the sky was blue or that bins were boring. Tima trusted her. It was a known thing. It required no further discussion.

Steph moved Tima to the cot. The same careful negotiation as the night before — the lifting, the stiffening, the micro-waking, the sinking. Tima landed in the cot and curled around Hoppy and was gone.

Eira was asleep three minutes later. She fell asleep the way she did everything — suddenly, completely, without negotiation. One moment awake, the next not. Her hand hung over the edge of the bed. Her curls covered half her face.

Steph stood in the doorway.

Two children. One room. The street light. The river. The dark.

She pulled the door to.

Sunday morning was rain.

It came in from the west — soft, persistent, the kind of rain that doesn't fall so much as materialise, arriving not from the sky but from the air itself, as if the valley were sweating. It covered the windows in a fine mist and made the street outside look like something seen through frosted glass.

Steph made pancakes because it was Sunday and because Eira had declared, the moment her eyes opened, that pancakes were a constitutional right and that Sundays without them were a violation of something she hadn't named but felt very strongly about.

The kitchen was warm. The radio was on low — a Welsh-language station, voices and music drifting in and out of the cooking sounds. Tima was in the highchair, engaged in the systematic deconstruction of a pancake. She did not eat it in the normal sense. She peeled it apart, layer by layer, examined the interior with the focus of a geologist studying strata, tasted each layer separately, and then, having assessed the entire structure, ate it in three large bites.

"She does that every time," Eira said, watching from her seat at the table where she was applying maple syrup to a pancake with the enthusiasm of a painter attacking a canvas. "She has to — what's it called — investigate."

"Inspect," Steph said.

"Inspect. She has to inspect it first."

"She's thorough."

"She's weird."

"She's thorough and weird. They're not mutually exclusive."

Eira ate her pancake. Tima ate her pancake (post-inspection). The rain tapped on the window. Steph drank her tea sitting down, which felt transgressive, but it was Sunday and the children were both eating and nobody was crying and the house was warm and she was going to sit down and drink tea at the table like a human being even if it only lasted four minutes.

It lasted six. She counted.