She was wearing her flowery pink-and-white pajamas that I had ironed for her earlier—Holly loves fresh-ironed clothes—and she had Clara perched on her pulled-up knees. In the soft golden halo from the bedside lamp she looked perfect and timeless as a little watercolor girl in a storybook. She terrified me. I would have given a limb to know that I was doing this conversation right, or even just that I wasn’t doing it too horrifically wrong.

I said, “It looks like that could have been what happened. It was a long, long time ago, so it’s hard to be sure about anything.”

Holly gazed into Clara’s eyes and thought about that. The strand of hair had found its way back into her mouth. “If I disappeared,” she said. “Would you think I had run away?”

Olivia had mentioned a nightmare. I said, “It wouldn’t matter what I thought. Even if I thought you’d hopped on a spaceship to another planet, I’d come looking for you, and I wouldn’t stop till I found you.”

Holly let out a deep sigh, and I felt her shoulder nudge in closer against me. For a second I thought I had accidentally managed to fix something. Then she said, “If you had married that girl Rosie. Would I never have been born?”

I detached the strand from her mouth and smoothed it into place. Her hair smelled of baby shampoo. “I don’t know how that stuff works, chickadee. It’s all very mysterious. All I know is that you’re you, and personally I think you’d have found a way to be you no matter what I did.”

Holly wriggled farther down in the bed. She said, in her ready-for-an-argument voice, “Sunday afternoon I want to go to Nana’s.”

And I could make chirpy chitchat with Shay across the good teacups. “Well,” I said, carefully. “We can have a think about that, see if it’ll fit with the rest of our plans. Any special reason?”

“Donna always gets to go over on Sundays, after her dad has his golf game. She says Nana makes a lovely dinner with apple tart and ice cream after, and sometimes Auntie Jackie does the girls’ hair all fancy, or sometimes everyone watches a DVD—Donna and Darren and Ashley and Louise get to take turns picking, but Auntie Carmel said if I was ever there I could have first pick. I never got to go because you didn’t know about me going over to Nana’s, but now that you do, I want to.”

I wondered if Ma and Da had signed some kind of treaty about Sunday afternoons, or if she just crushed a few happy pills into his lunch and then locked him in the bedroom with his floorboard naggin for company. “We’ll see how we get on.”