How do you know it’s the same hedgehog?

I put a splodge of paint on his bristles, did you see it?

Isn’t that cruel?

It’s a very tiny splodge. Right, I’m going to bed, you can report me to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Paint-Based Hedgehog Cruelty.

There was a pause.

Sorry for being hard on you about Cameron. I’d had a tough day, Cormac typed eventually.

No, you were right. I just wasn’t expecting it. I bought him a book!

Have you been hanging out with Nina Lennox?

Might have.

She thinks that’s the answer to everything.

Maybe it is.

If he can read.

I’ll pop back in.

Cheers.

Well, good night.

Good night.

And then a short time later:

Part III

Chapter 40

Neddie was gone the next day, but Lissa refilled his saucer anyway. She’d have liked to have taken a picture. On the other hand, she had a drawing. She pushed on through the garden and out into the field behind the house.

Lissa found herself wandering through the waist-high meadowsweet grass, breathing it in. When it wasn’t absolutely hosing, there was no doubt the landscape was completely ridiculous. She supposed the rain was what made the green so vivid as to be luminous and the clumps of wildflowers—and nettles, as she discovered when wandering off trail and being glad she hadn’t gone the whole hog and opted for shorts—so vibrant and full, the bees dancing among the tall purple flowers.

She found a stream rippling through the woods past the bluebells and, worrying slightly as to whether she’d be poisoned (she checked for sheep pooing in it: there didn’t seem to be many nearby), finally filled her water bottle—the sun was warm on her back—and took a long pull.

The freezing bright freshness of it made her gasp; she could feel it coursing down her throat, so pure and clean and bracing she felt her eyes dazzle with it. As she straightened up, almost drunk on the frozen light, she found herself face-to-face with a huge stag at the opposite end of the clearing.

She blinked and stretched out her phone to take a picture, almost as if it wasn’t real until she did . . . but as soon as she moved her arm, to her great regret, it turned and bounded, crackling through the bracken, the speed of it astonishing until it was gone and she felt like she’d dreamed it.