Which was also goodbye. Because at twenty-two months, the coming and the going were the same word, the same wave, the same gesture of: *I see you. You're there. That's enough.*

"Hiya, bach," Steph said.

The car door opened. Tima went in. The car door closed. Peter got in the passenger side with the deliberate movements of a man who has been folding himself into too-small cars for forty years and will continue to do so until either he or the cars give out. Erik got in. The engine started.

Steph stood in the doorway. Eira stood beside her, Eira's hand in hers.

The car pulled away. The brake lights. The corner. Gone.

The house was quiet.

It was the particular quiet that follows children — not silence, but the memory of noise. The air still held the shape of them. The cushion-nest was partially disassembled in the living room. The wooden spoon was on the hallway floor. A small sock — the other one, the match to Friday's — was under the sofa, discovered too late, and Steph picked it up and held it for a moment before putting it on the radiator. She'd give it back next time.

The travel cot was still up in Eira's room. She'd take it down later. Or tomorrow. Or she'd leave it up, the way she sometimes did, because there would be a next time, and a time after that, and the cot was as much a fixture of this house now as the mushroom lamp or the fairy lights or the stone on the kitchen windowsill.

Eira was in the living room, quiet for once, rearranging the remaining cushions into something new. Not a nest this time. A tower, maybe. Or a wall. She worked in silence, which was unusual for Eira, who normally narrated her own construction projects with the running commentary of a sports broadcaster.

Steph stood in the kitchen. She touched the rose quartz on the windowsill. She looked out at the rain, which was lighter now, thinning, the afternoon opening up behind it.

"Mummy?" Eira called from the living room.

"Yes, cariad."

"When is Tima coming back?"

Steph looked at the small sock on the radiator. She looked at the spoon on the floor. She looked at the space in the house where the weekend had been — the bath-time chaos, the puppet show, the morning hum of two voices finding the same melody, the word *Mummy* said twice by a child who didn't know what it meant but knew exactly who it was for.

"Soon," she said.

"How soon?"

"Soon enough."

The house settled. The radiator ticked. The rain thinned to mist. Somewhere in the valley, a car was driving north with a sleeping child in the back and a hippo in her arms and a pine cone in the bag and a biscuit for the journey and a drawing of two figures under a tree.

Eira went back to her cushions.