Matteo's mouth does the actual smile, brief and real, and I feel it against my shoulder.
She shifts, low and rolling, the evening shift, the contented one, the one she does when I am somewhere warm and the company is good and things are exactly as they should be.
She kicks, vivid and certain, the full statement kick, the one she makes when she has been listening and has formed views.
Santos laughs. The real one, filling the room.
Matteo sits up and very carefully puts his hand on my stomach, flat and warm, and he looks at his hand for a momentwith those pale eyes and then he looks at me with an expression that is careful and warm and entirely his own.
She kicks once more, softly, the goodnight kick, the settling-in kick, the kick of someone who has been listening to all of this and finds it satisfactory.
I put my hand over her.
Outside the window the stars are doing their excessive thing.
And in the warm dark of Santos's room, in the best room with the best view and the excellent mattress, I close my eyes.
No thorns.
Not one.
27
TOMAS
Ihave slept perhaps six hours in total, in intervals, sitting upright in the chair by the window or stretched across the foot of the bed while Santos and Matteo took their turns watching her. Jennifer moved through her heat, and we helped her as best we could, making sure she was safe, and the baby too.
She is awake now.
I can tell by the change in her breathing and by the shift in her scent, the strawberry coming up warmer as consciousness returns, the rose underneath it brightening. I am sitting at the window with my book open on my knee, not reading it. Matteo is at the edge of the bed with water. Santos is in the kitchen. I can hear the particular sound of him cooking.
I watch Jennifer push herself upright against the pillows and take the glass and I study her carefully. Color in her face. Steady hands. The heat has resolved cleanly and she looks, underneath the tiredness, like herself.
Santos brings the plate. She eats. We give her space. If she wants anything, she asks, and we are there. Once she finishes, then she sets the empty plate aside and looks at all three of us.
"I need to tell you something," she says.
Santos goes still in his chair. Matteo, who is already still, becomes a different quality of still. I set my book down and give her my full attention.
"The baby," she says.
No one says a word, the hairs stand up at the back of my neck. Matteo's eyes widen, for a split second it's as if fear takes over us, wondering if she's going to leave us to be with the father of the baby. We can't blame her, we did her wrong and maybe she still doesn't trust us.
"She's yours," Jennifer says. “One of you, I’m not sure who. She was always yours. I should have told you the moment I arrived on this island and I didn't and I'm sorry for that."
I am aware of Santos's saffron changing in the air, something vivid happening to it, and Matteo has gone entirely motionless by the bed. My own silver musk is doing something I can feel but not fully interpret, a kind of clarifying, the way the air clarifies before weather changes direction.
"So," I say, and my voice comes out with the particular careful evenness I use when I am keeping it level by effort, "when I said the bastard who got you pregnant and left."
"Yes," she says.
"You knew."
"Yes."
A pause.
And then I find the entire situation genuinely funny.