Heart-shaped Death Star with REBUILD banner

The wind has got under the back door again and the kitchen smells of wet gorse and burnt toast. Mrs Pargeter in number four finally paid her rent, in coins, counted out on the hall table as though she were buying a ticket out of town. Her nephew Alfie has been up in the attic room since Tuesday with a shoebox of grey pieces and a pot of glue, and he will not let Dad near it.

Yesterday I took him up his tea and found him wrestling a round thing the size of a cricket ball, pale grey, with a black hole cut into one side like a bored eye. Half of it had gone to pieces. He said it was a station, that it had been blown apart by people who should have known better, and that the heart-shaped version he was building was for his gran, who once told him everything broken can be mended if you are stubborn enough. I told him that was the sort of thing grans say.

He had painted a strip of paper, cream in the middle, yellow at one end and teal at the other, and written REBUILD across it in capitals so careful they looked stamped. He pinned it over the heart as if it were the only thing holding the mess together. When I asked why a heart, he said a heart is the one shape that does not look finished when it breaks. I did not understand that, and I still don't.

Tonight he is asleep and the lamp is still burning. I went up and found the heart on the windowsill facing the sea, its cracked side turned to the wall. Mrs Pargeter's coins sit in the tin on the dresser, and I have not decided whether to tell Dad. Come home at Easter if you can. Bring the good glue.

Love, Maud