"And this." Eira held out a pine cone — collected yesterday at the market, kept in her coat pocket overnight, now slightly fluffy with lint. "It's from the market. So she remembers."

Steph took the pine cone and put it in the bag. "What else?"

Eira disappeared and returned with a biscuit wrapped in a paper towel. "For the journey."

"The journey's forty minutes."

"Forty minutes is a long time if you're small."

Steph could not argue with this. The biscuit went in.

The knock came at half one.

Steph knew it was them before she opened the door — she could hear Peter's voice through the wood, saying something to Erik that she couldn't make out but that had the cadence of mild complaint, which was Peter's default register and, she suspected, his love language.

She opened the door.

Erik stood on the step. He looked tired — the good kind of tired, the tired of physical work done and finished, the tired of a man who has spent a weekend under someone else's boiler with a Cornishman and has survived. His hair was pushed back. His coat was dusty. He smelled of cold air and engine grease.

Peter was behind him, leaning against the garden wall, hands in his pockets, looking at the street with the expression of someone who has opinions about the brickwork but is keeping them to himself.

"How was the —" Erik began.

And then Tima saw him.

She was in the hallway behind Steph — she'd been playing with a wooden spoon, the same one she'd refused to let go of yesterday morning, the one that had now become a permanent feature of her weekend — and she looked up, and she saw him, and the wooden spoon hit the floor.

"Papa!"

It was not a word. It was a detonation. The whole body went into it — the arms up, the legs moving, the face breaking open into something so complete and so uncontrolled that Steph felt her own chest crack with it. Tima ran — that wide, unsteady, arms-out run — from the hallway to the door, and Erik crouched and caught her, and she hit him with the force of a small, determined planet meeting its sun, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her face in his collar and held on.

She held on the way she held Hoppy — with everything, with both hands, with the certainty that this thing was hers and that letting go was not an option.

Erik stood, lifting her. She climbed him — legs wrapping around his waist, arms around his neck, face pressed into the space behind his ear. She made a sound — not a word, not a cry. A sound. The sound of something that had been stretched across a weekend and was now snapping back to its original shape.