I was at once very tired and thirsty; the sun above us was too hot. “I need to lie down again,” I said to him, and felt the ground beneath me crater and then sink, and my head fall, as if in slow motion, into Edward’s palms. For a while, there was silence. “You big lolo,” I heard him say at last, but as if from far away, and his voice was fond. “You dummy,” he said, “you dummy, you dummy, you dummy,” repeating the word like a caress, while above me the sun stopped in its path, turning everything around me a bright, unyielding white.
