My 8-year-old son gave up his lunch money to buy a little girl with Down syndrome a red dress—the next morning, our lawn was covered with lunchboxes, but what was inside the biggest one made him go pale.

She has a laugh that starts somewhere around her knees.

And my son adored her from about the third for$ week.

Felix was six when they moved in. He is eight now. He would sit on the kerb next to her stroller and draw her pictures. He brought her dandelions out of our garden, dozens of them, until Perrin had to tell him about the allergies.

He could make that child laugh harder than anybody, including her own mother, by doing a thing with his face that I have never been able to replicate.

In the middle of April, we were in town and he stopped dead outside a shop on Marrow Street.

There was a red dress in the window. Toddler size. Not expensive-looking, but red — properly red — with a full skirt.

He said, “Mum. Effie would look like a princess in that.”

I said something noncommittal and moved him along.