“Bold pixie, then,” Rosie said. “Still okay with that? And I’ll colour it later, if you don’t react to the patch test.”

“Yep.” Jem put out a finger for Fluffy to catch hold of. “Yep, that’s fine.” She was still playing pat-a-cake with her new pal when Rosie scooped him up.

“He’ll get a fur coat if I don’t shift him,” Rosie said, carrying him past Jem and out of the room. Startled, Jem put a hand to the nape of her neck, feeling the draught there.

“Oh!” She looked in the mirror. Most of her hair was now lying on the floor, and it seemed Rosie was about to start fine-tuning what remained. “How long—did I fall asleep?”

“No, but you do seem quite easy to distract,” Rosie called back. Her voice quietened as she returned. “Sorry for pulling a Fluffy-assisted fast one, but I didn’t want you legging it after the first snip.”

“You’re forgiven.” Jem allowed Rosie to gently position her head, soothed by the touch and the rhythmic snick of the scissors. “The nurses would do that to me all the time when I was a kid. Distract me, I mean. I was in and out of the hospital every other month, and all they needed to do was wave a rubber glove balloon at me and I’d let the docs stick their needles wherever they wanted.”

Rosie hummed, the sound low and contemplative. “Was it an attention thing?”

Jem started to nod but aborted the gesture in case Rosie took her ear off. “Probably. Foster kids are all starved for it, I suppose. I’d get moved around a lot: a group home for a few months, then maybe a family would want to try me out for size. I had what they called ‘complex needs,’ so my family placements tended to be short-lived. I didn’t find out till years later, but Social Services warned my parents I had developmental delay.”

Rosie stopped cutting, her scissors poised but unmoving. “Did anyone ever set the record straight?”

“Yeah, my dad. He played a long game, sent my assigned social worker a copy of my GCSE results. I got fives As, an A star, and two Bs.”

“Swotty sod,” Rosie said without malice. “I scraped through mine and had to resit a couple. All that stuff with my stepdad—” She waved the scissors, dismissing the subject. “Anyway, I only knuckled down properly at college, when I turned over the proverbial fresh leaf.”

Jem smiled at her in the mirror. “My dad would say, ‘it doesn’t matter how you get there as long as you get there.’ Course, he’d usually roll that one out whenever he’d gone the wrong way and was too stubborn to ask for directions, but the sentiment is sound.”

“I think I’d like your dad.”