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weight onto one arm. Her head lolled. He extracted the car key from the back pocket of his jeans, popped open the car door, and eased Sophie into her child safety seat. He handled her like a patient cop with a drunken perp, laying one hand on the crown of her head to prevent her banging it on the door frame. One of the last remaining clumps of her hair came detached. Lifted on the wind, it rose briefly into the ragged sky, then floated down into the mud. Jack followed its progress with his eyes, then turned back to his daughter. He didn’t say anything.
    Sophie sat with her eyes half-closed, uncooperative while Jack worked to install her. She was sluggish, like a reptile waiting for the sun to warm her. On the other side of the car park, mammalian children inred Wellington boots and striped bobble hats giggled and splashed each other with the tawny water from the puddles.
    Sophie’s Hickman line was in exactly the wrong place for the seat belt where it rode across her collarbone, so they always needed to tuck a folded tea towel under the belt. He checked that it protected the Hickman line, and that the seat belt still ran smoothly.
    He squeezed Sophie’s knee.
    “How about that Vader?” he said.
    Her eyes came open. “He was so cool,” she said. “You remember how he’s actually Luke Skywalker’s father?”
    Jack grinned. “He is?”
    Sophie nodded. “He actually tells him? In Empire Strikes Back ? Right at the end?”
    Jack made a face as if he were weighing up the information. “You don’t want to believe everything a guy in black leather knee boots tells you.”
    The animation left Sophie’s face and a worried, provisional expression took its place.
    “What?”
    Jack’s stomach fell. He was an idiot for breaking the bubble.
    “Sorry, big girl. Forget it.”
    He went to stroke her cheek, but she turned her head away and folded her arms. Now Jack felt terrible for teasing her. This was what she dreamed about—what she believed in—while the other girls on their street rode their bikes and had Hannah Montana sleepovers.
    The guy who played Darth Vader had handled the Sophie situation pretty well. Better than Jack would have done, probably. People were actually okay. The man probably made—what?—ten quid an hour, eighty a day? In that stifling black costume, patiently helping under-tens select worlds to destroy.
    Jack wondered if he should have tipped Vader.
    He got into the driver’s seat and made sure that the Hickman lineemergency kit was still in the glove box of the car beside the sterilizing gel, in case Sophie began hemorrhaging through the line and it needed to be clamped.
    “Can you stop kicking the back of my seat, please?”
    “Sorry, Dad.”
    He plugged his phone into the cigarette lighter to charge, in case something happened en route and they needed to call in an emergency. He pulled the road atlas from beneath the passenger seat and memorized the route home to Manchester. Then he checked which hospitals were close to the route and tried to recall which ones had accident and emergency departments. This was in case Sophie began fitting, or lost consciousness, or was stung by a wasp or bee and needed a precautionary injection of adrenaline to stop her small body from going into shock.
    “Can you stop kicking my seat?”
    “Sorry.”
    He winked at her in the rearview mirror. He didn’t mind, really. If anything he liked it—found it reassuring that she wound him up in the ways a normal kid might.
    A movement in the mirror caught his eye, and Jack turned in his seat to see Kate and Zoe starting out across the car park. Zoe’s head was down. Kate was walking slowly, making it easy for Zoe to come alongside her if she wanted to, but Zoe walked a few paces behind. He wondered if she regretted having come along.
    He leaned across to make sure that the small cylinder of emergency oxygen for Sophie was accessible in the side pocket of the passenger door. He checked its air line for kinks or