‘You’re really lucky, you know.’
‘Um, why Pin?’
‘Because no one’s ever telling you what to do. You can stay awake until midnight if you want. And you never have to do your homework, or eat broccoli, or wear a button shirt.’
‘Yeah, but it’s horrible not having a home to go to,’ Mouse shoots back. ‘We have this football, on our lawn, that’s waiting for us …’ He pauses, your heart races.
‘Don’t give up,’ Pin says in rescue.
A shining quiet.
‘You’re really lucky your dad says goodnight to you every night,’ Tidge says finally, soft. ‘Ours used to do that. Blow out the light, he’d say, like it was a candle, and it’d turn off exactly when we puffed.’
‘You can have mine too if you want! He’ll adopt you.’
Your children smile. Because it’s a start. A ridiculous one but a start nonetheless. And this stranger in their midst seems to have a quality their father loves so much — empathy — and he’d be punching the air at that. He despises callousness because he says it’s a failure of the imagination, a failure to put yourself in someone else’s place.
‘No one gets left behind,’ Soli suddenly whispers, and each child puts a palm on a hand and squeezes tight.
In the shining quiet.
Take away love and our earth is a tomb.