Disclaimers, etc, see part one.

A Double Gammon.

* * * * *

I took all the children to school after breakfast. We managed to organise the whole thing with any words at all. Beatrice helped make lunches and pack bags. When I got back Angie and Philip were helping Michelle pack up all of Trevor's things.

Philip had sent Sally home. He looked frustrated, and tired. I think he'd thought that robots were all there was to the supernatural element of the world. To discover that vampires were real as well was uncomfortable. But in buying a robot he must have come across references to them.

Angie was angry. She was trying to ignore the thoughts going around her head that said that I had told her about me adolescence. I had to go to work. The house wasn't as sad as if he had died, which was just as well. There was enough anger in Michelle to keep her going.

I kissed Angie goodbye, and Michelle, and shook hands with Philip. But Angie was distracted and didn't really reply.

We were all home again at five o'clock. It was Sarah's night to make tea, so we were having risotto again. It's really very nice, but we'll have to teach her how to make something else.

We went through the family ritual of explaining what had happened with our days. Angie had spent the afternoon at work after leaving Michelle with her parents to clean up the house. We discussed the President's comments on the new housing program that had come out of the senate. He'd been in office for six months, and he was still in the grace period.

But no one said anything about Trevor. I kept looking at Angie. She wasn't looking at me. The not looking wasn't conspicuous, but I couldn't tell what she was thinking. There was no way I could bring up Trevor if she had successfully forgotten the whole incident. Sarah, it seemed, had bought my explanations of what had happened, and had enjoyed tormenting her friends with maths problems.

We'd just finished eating when the phone rang for Sarah. I don't know if Kai is actually her boyfriend, or if she just wants him to be. She grabbed the phone and disappeared upstairs. Angie disappeared too with the work she hadn't done that morning.

Lizzie and I played backgammon. Arthur taught me to loose respectively in the week me had at their house before our wedding. I taught both Sarah and Lizzie to play, but Lizzie took to it much more readily. She has the ability to adjust tactics to the various dice rolls. I've seen Buffy fight, you have to block each blow as it comes. Strategies work, but detailed plans don't. Elizabeth is a biblical name, like Sarah. I wanted her named for Buffy, the strongest woman I know, not just literally. Of course, I can't call her Bethy, like Angie does, because I'm nervous of one day calling her Buffy. Which would not be good.

My first throw was a one, and hers a six, so she secured her seventh point straight off. It was going to be an embarrassing game for me. The first time she beat me I was proud. She could beat me consistently by the time she four and I remembered what Robin had said about being scared.

"Who killed uncle Trevor?" she asked.

"There was gang outside their house. He had been gambling with them. They wanted him to pay his debts. He couldn't."

"So they killed him."

"They turned him into a vampire, that's worse. He could have hurt the people he loved much more than if he were simply dead."

"Then why didn't you tell aunty Shelly that he was dead?"

I had to answer that one carefully. Lizzie's questions were motivated in part by curiosity. For the most part, thought, she was a scared little girl. I couldn't give her the harshly honest "they would have wanted to see a body."

"People don't like knowing about the things we know, Lizzie."

"But she hates him now," she said. She was still working it out.

"It'll keep her going. It's something she can hold onto. You can't hold on to grief. We will mourn his death, Lizzie. But the monster that came into house wasn't him. Trevor was already dead then. And in a fight like that, you protect the people who are alive."

I blotted her, but I only had two inner points covered.

"Couldn't he have been like the vampires you knew?" she asked. "They were good."

I gave the speech Buffy had about Angel having a soul. And I did my best to explain Spike's slow evolution into a useful creature. I hadn't payed that much attention to it, and all my memories of him were clouded by the way Buffy had said his name for the last time. I could tell her, though, that fighting was what he did, and in the beginning at least, fighting with us had been the only way. Then it became habit, not choice.

"So he didn't choose to be good," Lizzie said. "He just ended up like that."

"In a way. But he did go and get himself a soul because he had hurt Buffy, and he didn't want to do that again. Because he loved her."

"But Trevor loved Michelle, and Caroline, didn't he?"

Lizzie had managed to take two of my pieces while still asking the most difficult questions. I wasn't trained in this. I realised for the first time that part Giles's Watcher's training would have been how to talk to Potentials and their families. I wanted Willow with her motherly baking and teacher's explanations to come and tell my daughter exactly how bad the world could be. My wife was in no position to say anything. And I had wanted it like that.

"He did. He loved them very much, which is why he never wanted them to get hurt. A vampire is very strong. And they can't come in uninvited. You know that?"

I had put both my men back on the board, so she took another one. She nodded.

"I'm serious, I've seen it work," I told her. "When Willow de-invited deadboy from the Slayer's house she said he bounced off the air in the doorway. I saw Harmony's gang bounce of the door, too. Harmony was so annoyed she stamped her foot. And even when, ah, Dawn, invited her in the minions couldn't come in. This was a girl who didn't have original thought all through high school. And suddenly she had minions and plan to take the Slayer down. Even I could fight her. It was like if Trinity had her own gang instead of Kara."

Lizzie laughed. It was a little hysterical. But no one has ever maintained a straight face on hearing that Harmony had minions. I let her have the stake to put in her bedside drawer. She snuggled down with her bear-bear and smiled at me before she closed her eyes.