Dear Evelyn, I am going to try to be calm about this because I think that’s what you’d want. My daughter Isla is seven. For about six weeks now she has been talking about a friend she calls ‘the Tall Man’ who waits for her near the big gum tree at the edge of the school oval. She says he is very tall and thin, that he doesn’t have a face the way we have faces, and that he is ‘bad at talking but good at listening.’ She seems completely unbothered by him. Happy, even. Her teacher called me in last week — I thought it was about the friend, but no. She wanted to show me Isla’s drawings of him and tell me Isla has ‘remarkable perspective for her age’ and that the foreshortening in particular is very advanced. She did not seem to register what was actually in the drawing. I sat there looking at this detailed pencil sketch of an eight-foot faceless figure standing under a tree and nodded along while her teacher talked about art enrichment programmes. I don’t know what to do. Isla says he never follows her home. She says he knows he’s not supposed to. That last part is either reassuring or the most unsettling thing I’ve ever heard and I genuinely cannot decide which.

Margot, the part where he knows he’s not supposed to follow her home — that is the part to hold onto. That is actually the most useful sentence in your entire letter, and I want you to sit with it for a moment before we go further.

In my experience with entities of this particular configuration — the height, the stillness, the oval or field placement, the absence of conventional facial features — the ones who understand and observe relational boundaries are almost categorically less concerning than the ones who don’t. A boundary acknowledged is a boundary that can be maintained. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, quite a lot.

Now. Two things I would suggest.

The first is practical: establish a consistent goodbye ritual for Isla at the school gate. Something small and repeatable — a phrase she says, a gesture, something that signals the visit is finished for the day. Children’s relationships with liminal figures benefit enormously from structure and clear endpoints. It gives the child agency, and in my observation it also communicates something to the entity itself — that there is a shape to the friendship, that it has a beginning and an end each day. You are not forbidding the friendship. You are giving it walls, which is what all friendships need. Ask Isla what she thinks would be a good goodbye. She will have an idea. They usually do.

The second — and I want you to trust me here — is to leave a single dried calendula flower at the base of that gum tree on a Thursday. Not a bunch. One. Don’t explain it to anyone, including Isla. This communicates acknowledgement without invitation, which is precisely the register you want.

(A brief aside: my calendula has come in extraordinarily well this season, which I mention because I’ve had three letters in the past month that have required it. There may be something in the air. There often is, in autumn.)

As for the teacher — Margot, I know. I know. The foreshortening comment in front of that drawing. But consider: Isla’s teacher has given her a safe, enthusiastic adult response to something Isla has chosen to represent on paper. Isla is not frightened. She is drawing. That is genuinely healthy, and the teacher’s obliviousness has accidentally protected that. Let it be. Enrol her in the art enrichment programme if it’s offered. The Tall Man and the perspective lessons are not mutually exclusive, and Isla, by the sound of it, is managing both with more composure than most adults I have corresponded with.

You are doing the right things by paying attention and by writing to me. Keep doing both.