He's fascinated, she realizes as he sets the piece he'd been fiddling with aside; an action that both surprises and pleases her so much it's nearly the only thing she can focus on for a moment.

"Almost exactly," she says. "Everything looked the way Lytten always described when he'd read me bits from whatever he'd been writing, some of the people I met had the same names as characters he'd told me about...one of them even looked a little like him, which was really strange."

Rosie stops again, looking over at him with a wry smile. "I've tried to work out whether it exists because he wrote it, or whether he wrote it because it exists, and only managed to give myself a headache."