Harper stepped forward. ‘Kieran, I’m glad you’re here.’

He stared at her. ‘You don’t get to say that like you weren’t the one who locked the doors.’

‘You’re right.’

‘Everybody says you’re sorry now. That doesn’t bring back three weeks.’

‘No, it doesn’t.’

He looked toward the frames. ‘Those are too light. They’ll wobble when someone pulls the screen.’

Harper nearly smiled. ‘Would you tell us how to strengthen them?’

‘I’m not coming back just to fix your mistakes.’

‘You don’t have to.’

He started to turn away. Sachi called, ‘You wrote the part where the city goes quiet. We’re still using it.’

Kieran stopped. ‘You kept that?’

‘Of course we did.’

He studied the frame again. Finally he pointed to a crosspiece. ‘Put a diagonal brace there. Then another on the opposite side. And keep the weights on the ground, not on the cloth.’

Harper handed him a pencil. He took it without meeting her eyes. Twenty minutes later he was kneeling beside the frames, explaining to Milo how to avoid twisting the wood when tightening the clamps.

At five, Odessa tried to move a box that contained the repaired dragon head. Nell caught her arm.

‘Grandma, ask before you move things.’

Odessa stopped. ‘May I carry this to the far table?’

‘No. Ari needs it here.’

The older woman placed it down. A month earlier she might have argued that she knew what was best. Now she nodded and asked which box needed carrying instead.

Harper saw the exchange from across the courtyard. She thought of the ruined pool, where Odessa had used children’s objects to force a conversation. The apology was real, but it was not complete. Reparations, Harper was discovering, happened in the unremarkable moments when a person chose not to repeat the act that caused harm.

As sunset approached, the children attempted the first full rehearsal. The city appeared across the screen in pieces: a bakery with crooked windows, a crooked tower, a tall house that moved too fast and bumped into a cardboard moon. The voices overlapped. The door fell forward with a papery sigh. Milo burst out laughing, and Ari followed him.

Harper laughed as well. They had no chance of producing something as polished as Brightline’s spectacle. But this show belonged to the people making it, and they could change it whenever they learned something new.

Then the courtyard lights went out.

For a moment everyone stood silent. Tamsin emerged from the bakery, wiping flour from her hands.

‘It’s not the power company,’ she said. ‘The timer in the bicycle shop switches the exterior outlets off at seven. I forgot.’