Eira was singing. She did this sometimes — began singing without preamble or context, as if a song had been building inside her and the pressure required release. This one was a Welsh nursery rhyme from school — *Dau gi bach yn mynd i'r coed* — and she sang it softly, her voice high and clear and not quite in tune but perfectly in feeling, the way children's singing always is.

Tima was listening. She'd stopped eating (post-inspection, mid-consumption) and was watching Eira with that absolute attention, that full-self listening she did. Then she began to hum.

Not the words. She didn't have the words. Just the melody — or something close to it, a version of it, shaped by a twenty-two-month-old mouth that couldn't produce the sounds but could carry the shape. A hum that followed Eira's singing the way a shadow follows movement — not quite matching, slightly behind, but unmistakably the same thing.

Eira noticed. She didn't stop singing, but she slowed down, giving Tima more space in the melody, and Tima's hum shifted to fill it — louder now, more confident, the two voices braiding together in the steam-warm kitchen while the rain came down outside.

Steph stood at the counter with her mug and listened and didn't move. There are moments in a house — she knew this, she'd known it for four years — that don't announce themselves. They arrive in the middle of ordinary things and they don't stay long. A song. Two voices. Rain. The warmth of a kitchen and the smell of pancakes and two children alive in the same room, reaching for the same melody, finding it, holding it, letting it go.

The song ended. Eira went back to her syrup. Tima went back to her pancake.

Steph drank her tea.

The second time was quieter.

Tima was on the floor in the living room, building something out of Eira's wooden blocks. Not building, exactly — stacking. Two blocks, three blocks, a fourth placed with the concentrated precision of someone who understands that this next one is the one that matters. She got to five, and it fell. She looked at the fallen tower. She looked at Steph. She didn't cry. She didn't react at all, in fact, except to pick up the first block and begin again.

Steph was on the sofa, folding laundry. The domestic work that never ended — the clean, the fold, the put-away, the find-another-pile. She folded Eira's school jumper, a pair of small purple socks, a vest. She folded one of Tima's tops — the yellow one with the bee on it that Erik had packed — and felt the smallness of it in her hands. The cotton still warm from the dryer. The sleeves shorter than her forearm.

Tima stood up. She left the blocks and walked over to Steph — that determined, wide-legged walk — and stopped at her knees. She held her arms up.

"Mummy," she said.