Even when Tilly sleeps again, you don’t, and nor does he. You both watch the minute, ticking progress of the little blue plane icon, over the emptiness of the North Atlantic Ocean, its route curving up towards Greenland and the Labrador Sea before it will begin to fall again towards Ireland and onwards and home, endless, inexorable. You watch it, and talk some more, and these are some of the things you talk about. How unfeasible it is that this great sleek lumbering mass of metal can rise instead of falling, into the sky, up and up, can traverse the globe along invisible, predetermined tracks, corridors in the air, while its passengers sleep and watch films and flush toilets and request more ice for their gin and tonic and eat bread rolls specially engineered to taste normal at low pressure and in dry cabin air. That there is the world, the ocean, the dark roiling waves, thirty-however-many thousand feet beneath, and here you are, suspended above it all, hurtling onwards at hundreds of miles an hour into the dawn of an entirely different day. How time as a 127measure is, for a while, entirely meaningless, in this time out of time, and how distance is too, and about the distances we travel, between where we come from and where we end up, between who we thought we were and who we turn out to be. About how – who knows? – for your daughter there will not be transatlantic travel, at least not like this, and it may seem the most grotesque decadence of a bygone age. We think, or rather we live – or at least you do, or have – as if things will continue forever, and we so rarely talk about the only things, in hindsight, that matter. All of these words, these thousands of words, and none of them the right ones, the handful of words that might have meant or even changed something. And, once again, only this time with even more urgency, can people change, or is it already too late, is it always too late? Or is there always another brief window in which anything is possible?

And these are just some of the things.

The plane descends. Tray tables and seat backs, seat belts, final cabin checks. Blurs of light resolving themselves into constellated pinpoints; buildings, roads, almost individual headlamps. The rattle and grind of the landing gears, the final roar of the engines. The headlong rush of the plane onto tarmac, the shuddering certainty of it. Your stomach lurching.

He carries your bags for you off the plane as you carry Tilly, still heavy with sleep. You wait together as they fetch the 128buggy, and you kick and yank it upright, and strap Tilly in. By this stage, you’re among the last off the plane, and several other red-eye flights have come in too, and the Immigration hall is packed.

Oh no, you say, and he rests a hand lightly on your shoulder.