Steph pulled the door to. Not closed. Just to. She left the landing light on, the way she always did — a thin line of gold beneath the door.

Downstairs, the house was quiet. The cushion-nest was still assembled in the living room. A rice cake she hadn't noticed was wedged between two sofa cushions. A small sock — Tima's — lay on the carpet like a flag someone had planted and walked away from.

She made tea. She sat on the sofa. She held the mug in both hands and let the quiet settle.

The house held two sleeping children now. Hers and not-hers. Both hers tonight. The weight of that — not heavy, not light. Just present. Real. The same weight it always was, on the weekends when Tima stayed, on the nights when Erik needed someone to be the mother, and Steph was there, and Steph was always there, and the word for what she was didn't exist in any language she knew but the feeling of it was exact and permanent and needed no name at all.

She drank her tea. She listened to the house. She waited for nothing in particular.

The weekend had begun.

Tima woke at quarter to six.

Steph heard her through the monitor — not crying, not calling out. Just talking. The low, private babble of a child who has woken in a room that is not her room and is negotiating this fact with the only person she trusts completely.

"Oppy," she said. Then a pause. Then a string of syllables that were not words but had the cadence of words — rising, falling, a question mark at the end. Another pause. "Oppy." A rustling sound. The creak of the cot. More babble, softer now, confiding, as if she was telling the hippo something important and didn't want to be overheard.

Steph lay in bed and listened. She knew this sound. She had known it with Eira — the pre-dawn monologue, the child waking into her own language, the murmured conversation with the dark. It was one of the most private things a child did, this talking before anyone came. Before the world arrived with its breakfast and its shoes and its agenda. Just the child and the ceiling and whatever lived in the space between waking and being awake.

She gave it five minutes. Then she went in.

Tima was standing in the cot, Hoppy in one hand, the other hand gripping the rail. Her hair was flattened on one side and vertical on the other. Her sleeping bag was bunched around her knees. She looked up when Steph opened the door and her face did the thing Steph had seen a thousand times with Eira but that still landed every time — the brightening. Not a smile, exactly. Something before a smile. The moment the face recognises someone it was hoping to see.

"Hiya," Tima said.

"Bore da, bach," Steph whispered. "Early bird, you are."