3)Myanmar has three international airports and one of them has closed because of damage to the runway. If your mum was planning to fly from this airport she would have had to travel the length of the country to a different one. Even if she has managed to change her flight, the flight itself takes over twenty hours, usually with two changes, so she would come back a day late. There have been reports of 180 fatalities. The country has a population of over fifty-three million people, and this doesn’t include tourists. Using this data, the probability of your mum being one of the fatalities is roughly 1 in 294,000. This is an estimate, but I think you’ll agree that the odds are reassuring.
See you tomorrow, Mega Knickers.
Ed.

After Elsa’s bath, I take her for a sleepy walk along the seafront, leaving Grandad at the flat making dinner for us: spaghetti bolognaise with baked beans. It sounds revolting, but I doubt I’ll be eating much. I wander along to the far end of the prom, well away from the pier, and scramble down the pebbly beach. While Elsa and I stare at the rolling, crashing waves, Pongo zooms around, stopping every now and then to sniff the air.

‘Can you see Orion?’ I ask Elsa, lifting my face to the sky and pointing. Elsa points too, copying as I trace the constellation. ‘That star is Rigel and it’s shining forty thousand times brighter than our sun.’ Her hands close like she’s trying to grab at the sky. ‘And there’s Betelgeuse. Get a good look at it because it’s going to supernova soon … Well, sometime in the next million years.’ Elsa’s hand falls down and I see that her eyes are closing.

I start to rock from side to side. Ed’s message helped. His conclusion – that statistically, Mum should be fine – was something I knew already, but his words meant much more than that. I’d been on and off the internet all afternoon and hadn’t found out half the things he discovered. He must have spent a long time looking up those facts for me. And he wasn’t the only one who was thinking about me. Annie sent me a picture of a galaxy with Keep calm and look at the stars written across it. The fact that it wasn’t sarcastic, or a black hole joke, or a sarcastic black hole joke, meant a lot.

So that’s why I’m out here staring up at the sky, waves crashing down around me. My mission isn’t over, it’s just changed and I’m not giving up yet. When I get home, I’m writing a letter to Christine at the nursery and I’m going to fill it with missing capital letters and ‘Namaste’s and smileys so she’ll be convinced it’s from mum. Then Grandad and I will carry on looking after Elsa until Mum comes home. Because she is coming home.

‘Come on, Pongo!’ I call, then I turn my back on the beautiful cosmos and walk up the beach, my feet slipping on the stones.