Chapter 104 The Weight of It
Twenty-three weeks and nothing fits anymore.
I stood in front of the mirror on a Tuesday morning, holding the waistband of the last pair of trousers that had worked as recently as three weeks ago, and watched it fail to close by a distance that was no longer close enough to negotiate. I put them down. Stood there in the pale morning light and looked at what my body had become.
Round. Forward. Entirely committed to what it was doing.
I pressed both palms flat against my stomach and felt the shift underneath, that slow rolling response, the baby turning toward pressure the way they always did, like they were already leaning into whatever reached for them.
Lycian appeared in the doorway with a cup of coffee. He looked at me in the mirror, at the trousers on the bed, at my hands on my stomach. He crossed the room and stood behind me without a word. His hand came to rest on the side of my bump. His chin dropped to my shoulder.
Both of us in the mirror together.
I had looked at my reflection a thousand times in this room and it had never looked like this. Like something shared. Like something that belonged to more than one person.
“Thirteen weeks,” I said.
“Thirteen weeks,” he agreed.
He kissed the side of my head and went back to the kitchen.
I stayed in the mirror a moment longer. Pressed my hands closer. I felt the baby still under my palms, quiet now, settled.
Thirteen weeks felt both very short and very long depending on which part of my brain was doing the calculating.
Later I drove to the estate. Lycian had a Council call. The house was quiet in a way that had started feeling less peaceful and more hollow the further along I got, some instinct pulling me toward people, toward the particular noise and warmth of a full table.
Aunt Clara opened the door before I knocked. She denied watching from the window. Her expression confirmed she had been.
The kitchen smelled like cinnamon and strong coffee. She put a plate in front of me without asking. I ate without negotiating with myself about it, which was new, which was the pregnancy doing something useful for once.
My father sat at the far end with papers spread around him. Damien came in from outside leaving mud on the floor. Clara pointed. He reversed. Returned in sock feet. Sat across from me and assessed the remaining pastries with strategic intent.
I had been missing this. Not the building. The people in it. The way everyone moved through the same space was like they had forgotten to perform for each other.
The baby kicked. High and sharp, a new location, right up under my left rib. I made a sound and pressed my hand there and Clara was already watching.
“Left side, high,” I said.
“Running out of room. They’ll keep repositioning for the next few weeks.” She said it the way she said everything, calmly, factually, like it was ordinary. Because it was. “Completely normal.”
Normal. That word had become the most beautiful word in my vocabulary.
My father put his pen down. Looked at my face with the particular attention he gave to things he noticed before I named them.
“Something’s bothering you,” he said.
Not a question.
I looked at my hands on the table. At the place where my stomach now pressed against the edge of it, solid and present, impossible to ignore.
“Thirteen weeks,” I said. “I keep thinking about what could still go wrong in thirteen weeks.”
The kitchen was quiet in the soft, ordinary way of early morning. The clock ticked steadily on the wall, loud enough to notice now that no one was talking. Clara stood at the counter with her mug cupped between both hands, steam rising slowly past her face. She was very still, like she was giving the moment room to breathe.
My father was quiet for a long moment.
He did not rush to fill the silence the way he used to. Once, he would have spoken immediately, offering logic, advice, something practical. But sometime in the past year he had learned that some things needed to sit for a while before they needed an answer.
“You have survived things that should have killed you,” he said finally.
His voice was calm, steady. Not dramatic, just certain.
“A difficult birth is not in the same category as any of them.”
He looked at me across the table, really looked, the way he did when he wanted to make sure I heard the meaning behind the words and not just the sound of them.
“And you will not be doing it alone.”
The words settled somewhere deep in my chest.
I nodded slowly, trying to let them land properly instead of brushing past them the way fear kept tempting me to do.
Before I could say anything else, the baby kicked.
Right in the same place as before.
Insistent.
I pressed my hand against the spot out of instinct. A second later there was another push from the inside, stronger this time, like the baby was responding.
I blinked, surprised.
“Well,” I murmured under my breath.
I pressed back lightly.
The baby pushed again. Harder.
A laugh slipped out of me before I could stop it, sudden and bright in the quiet kitchen.
Aunt Clara glanced over the rim of her mug, smiling softly like she had been waiting for that sound.
My father watched for another second, the corner of his mouth almost lifting, before he calmly picked his pen back up and returned to the papers spread across the table, the scratch of it against the page blending with the steady ticking of the clock.
Outside a car passed slowly on the street. The clock ticked. The pastry Damien had been slowly dismantling disappeared entirely and he looked at the empty plate with the expression of someone surprised to find it empty.
I should have felt better.
I did, mostly.
But on the drive home, my phone buzzed on the passenger seat. A message from a number I didn’t recognize. No name. No context.
Just four words.
We know you’re pregnant.
I pulled over.
Stared at the screen.
The road was empty around me. The afternoon is quiet. Completely ordinary.
My hands had stopped being steady.