Tima considered this. Then she pointed into the house.

"Eira?"

"She's inside. Shall we go find her?"

"Eira," Tima said again, with more certainty this time, as if the name itself was a decision, and she'd made it.

Eira had been preparing.

This was evident from the state of the living room, which looked like a small, determined person had attempted to redecorate it using only cushions, blankets, and a selection of stuffed animals arranged in what could only be described as a defensive formation around a nest of pillows on the floor.

"It's Tima's bed," Eira announced from the middle of the arrangement, her chestnut curls wild, her face flushed with the exertion of significant creative work. "I made it. It's better than the cot."

"The cot is already set up in your room, cariad."

"This is better. It has a roof." She held up a blanket. "See? Roof."

"That's a blanket."

"It's a roof-blanket."

Tima was already wriggling to get down. Steph set her on the floor and she stood for a moment — that wide-legged, slightly swaying stance, like a sailor on a shifting deck — and then walked toward Eira with the focused determination she brought to all locomotion. She was steady now, at twenty-two months. Not graceful — grace would come later, or maybe never; maybe Tima would always move the way she moved, with that deliberate, considered quality, each step a small decision — but steady. She reached the cushion nest and stood at its edge, looking down at it the way a surveyor looks at a building site.

"Dat," she said, pointing.

"It's yours!" Eira said. "Sit down. I'll get your blanket."

Tima sat. She sat the way she always sat — straight down, no lowering, just a controlled collapse, her legs folding under her. She looked around at the cushions. She looked at the stuffed animals. She picked up a felt rabbit she didn't recognise and held it up to Hoppy, as if introducing them.

"Oppy," she said, pressing the rabbit against Hoppy's face.

"That's Mr Carrots," Eira informed her. "He's nice but he's quite old. Be gentle."

Tima put Mr Carrots down with exaggerated care.

"Right," Steph said from the doorway, watching the two of them — Eira already rearranging the nest to accommodate its guest, Tima sitting in the middle of it with the serene gravity of a visiting dignitary. "Bath in twenty minutes."

"Can Tima have bubbles?"

"Everyone gets bubbles."

"Can Tima have the duck?"

"The duck is communal property, Eira."

"What's communal?"

"It means you share."

Eira processed this. "Okay. But I get the duck first."

Bath time was, as it always was with two, an exercise in managed catastrophe.