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Annoyed, Flynn dragged himself up the stairs and into the kid’s pink room, and once again felt like he was swimming in a vat of Pepto-Bismol.
“I brought you a book.” He tried not to sound like a grumpy old man.
“Yay!” Katy sat up in bed and started bouncing. “A book, a book, I love books.”
“Great. This one is called Famous Footballers.” He pointed at the cover. “Tonight we’re going to learn all about someone called Pelé.”
“That’s a weird name.”
“Some people think Katy’s a weird name.”
“Not smart people.”
He shook his head, pulled up a chair and started to read the section on Brazil’s greatest footballer. Possibly the greatest footballer ever.
“Are you still kissing my mum?” Katy said in the middle of his reading, proving she had no respect for the topic.
“Not right now.” It came out like a blast from a cannon. Luckily, his tone had no effect on Katy.
“Jonathan says kissing somebody is how you get Germans.”
“Why me?” Flynn appealed to the ceiling. “Not Germans. Germs. They’re tiny bugs you can’t see. They can make you sick.”
“Invisible?”
“Yeah.”
“How do you know they’re there if you can’t see them?”
“Okay, maybe not invisible, just really tiny. People with big magnifying glasses can see them.”
“How do they make you sick?”
“They crawl up your nose, then fly through your body kicking stuff until you feel sore. Then they have a party, overindulge and puke up a lot. That’s what snot is. It’s germ puke.”
Her eyes went wide. Her hands flew to her nose. “How do you stop them getting up your nose?”
“You stop breathing.”
She gasped. “If I don’t breathe I’ll die.”
“And if you do breathe you’ll get germs. Then you might get sick and die anyway. It’s a chance we all take. It’s life, kid.”
“Flynn!” Abby’s voice echoed through the house. “Get dow
n here.”
“I need to go.”
She pointed at her forehead. “What do you do at bedtime?”
He rolled his eyes, kissed her forehead and told her to sleep well. Bloody terrorist. He left the football book beside her bed and went to see what’d wound Abby up this time.
He found her in the kitchen. She was chopping potatoes as though she had a personal grudge against them.
“You can’t tell a five-year-old not to breathe. Are you insane? Do you want her to hold her breath until she turns blue? Or suffocate herself because she doesn’t want to breathe in germs? Fix this.”
Flynn barely resisted the urge to salute her. He bit his tongue as she pointed at the door, aware she had a knife in her hand. Beyond irritated, he thumped back up the stairs and opened Katy’s door.
