Chapter 105 Night Moves
The baby was awake at two in the morning.
Not a gentle awareness either. A full campaign of kicks in sets of three, a pause, then three more, with the focused persistence of someone who had decided that sleeping was not something they were interested in, and the inside of my ribs was a perfectly reasonable place to make that known.
I lay in the dark and counted them.
Three. Pause. Three. Pause. Then a longer rolling movement, slow and deliberate, turning from one side to the other with the unhurried ease of someone who had all the space in the world, which they did not, which seemed not to bother them at all.
Twenty-six weeks. I had learned their rhythms the way I had learned everything about this pregnancy, through attention and repetition and the particular intimacy of carrying someone who could not yet speak but communicated constantly. They were quietest in the mornings. Most active in the late afternoons and then again at two in the morning, which Aunt Clara said was completely normal and which my body had accepted as simply the shape of things now.
Lycian stirred beside me.
His hand found my stomach in the dark before he was fully awake. The automatic reaching that had become his sleeping habit over the past two months, his body knowing even in sleep that there was something to stay close to.
He pressed his palm flat against the kicks.
“Again,” he said. Not a question. His voice was thick with sleep.
“They’re busy.”
He pushed himself up onto one elbow. Both of us in the dark with our hands on my stomach, feeling the baby move between our palms.
“What do you think they’re doing in there,” he said.
“I don’t know. Practicing something.”
“Could be training,” he said. Completely serious. “Getting ready.”
I laughed quietly. The baby kicked at the movement and I laughed again and they kicked again, the back and forth of it like a conversation neither of us was qualified to be having.
He lowered his head and pressed his lips to the side of my stomach. Not speaking. Just there. His breath was warm through the fabric of my shirt. I ran my fingers through his hair and felt him exhale slowly against me.
The room was dark and warm. Outside the wind moved through the garden in long sweeps, pressing at the window and releasing. The heating ticked. The house settled around us in the deep quiet of the hour before anything starts.
I was not unhappy to be awake.
That still surprised me. Six months ago two in the morning meant something was wrong. Meant I was running calculations or bracing for whatever came next or lying alone in a narrow bed feeling the specific loneliness of someone with no one to call. Now there was a warm hand beside mine and a mouth pressed gently against my stomach and the sound of Lycian breathing and the baby announcing themselves in sets of three.
The world had changed so completely that sometimes I had to check the memory of it to believe it had ever been otherwise.
Aunt Clara had told me at my appointment two days ago that the two in the morning activity was the baby’s way of reminding me they were there. She had said it in her direct practical way, writing in her notebook, not looking up. Then she had looked up and added, though I suspect you don’t need reminding.
I didn’t.
Every kick was a reminder that landed in a place that never got used to it. Every movement was a confirmation of something so enormous that I had stopped trying to hold it all at once and had learned instead to just hold the piece of it that was in front of me. This kick. This moment. This dark room.
Aunt Clara had been different since coming back to practice.
Not different in personality. Still direct, still precise, still the person who said exactly what she thought without decoration. But there was something in her that had loosened. Something that had been held tight through the illness years, through the stepping away, through all the time she had spent being a patient instead of a doctor, that had begun to release as she returned to the work.
She moved through the clean room she had built with a quiet confidence that belonged to someone doing what they were made for. She handled the equipment with the ease of a hand remembering. She explained everything she was doing while she did it, measurements and observations, and what they meant, treating me not just as her patient but as someone who deserved to understand every part of what was happening in my own body.
She had said once, sitting across from me at the kitchen table after an appointment, that practicing medicine for the Collective had been the great compromise of her life. That she had been young and sick and had taken what was offered because she had no other choice, had used her skills for people who used them in turn for things she had not always been able to live with. That the cancer had felt, in her darkest moments, like a reckoning. Like her body settling a debt she had not known how to settle any other way.
And then I had healed her and she had been given back everything. Her health. Her hands. Her work. And this time she got to choose what she did with it.
She was choosing this. Every appointment. Every careful note. Every two in the morning she had told me to call if anything felt different.
I felt Lycian’s breathing slow against my stomach. Drifting back toward sleep.
“Go back to sleep,” I said softly.
“I’m awake.”
“You’re not.”
He made a sound that was not quite agreement and stayed exactly where he was, his hand still warm against the kicks.
The baby settled gradually. The movements spaced out. Became lighter. Then one last slow roll, unhurried and complete, like someone finally finding a comfortable position after a long search, and then stillness.
His hand stayed.
Mine stayed over his.
I looked at the ceiling in the dark. At the faint shape of the warm light fitting we had chosen together, the one that would not be harsh in the night when we came in for feeds. The pale rectangle of the window. The shadow of the curtain.
Our room. Our house. Everything is arranged around us in the dark.
I thought about Aunt Clara’s hands in the clean room, moving with the sureness of someone returned to themselves. I thought about what she had given up and what she had been given back and the strange circular grace of it, that the power which had come from my mother’s sacrifice had found its way to the woman who would help my daughter arrive safely into the world.
Nothing wasted.
Not one piece of any of it was wasted.
The baby was still. Lycian’s breathing had gone deep and even. The house was quiet around us in the way it was quiet at this hour, completely, the world outside having no business with us.
I closed my eyes.
Let the dark be what it was.
Warm and full and entirely ordinary and more than I had ever known to hope for.
Ten weeks.
We were almost there.