Liam announced it at breakfast, between the second and third triangle of his toast.
“I want to go to the science museum,” he said. “They have a new rocket.”
“I know,” Mia said.
She had been hearing about the rocket for two weeks. It featured in Liam’s conversation the way certain things did at five — not constantly, but with a steady underlying presence, the way a river runs beneath the ground.
“Can Leo come?”
Mia looked up from her coffee. Liam was looking at Leo with the direct, unself-conscious expectation of a child who has simply identified what he wants and seen no reason not to ask for it. Leo was looking back at him with an expression she had come to recognise — the particular stillness that came over him when Liam said something that landed in the vicinity of the place where
