My mind reflects on the way Matteo reaches toward me without knowing he is doing it. Santos, already in the kitchen before I have thought about being hungry. Tomas, marking his page the moment he hears my footsteps.
My daughter, shifting low and rolling in the warm dark of me, having listened to everything and found it satisfactory.
I put my hand on my stomach.
I should be grateful. I am grateful, but I'm used to doing things for myself, not to have someone do things for me. There's only one person I want to speak to right now and that's sis.
Anna answers on the second ring. I think she permanently has her phone by her side.
"You're alive," she says. "How are you feeling?”
"Like something that went through a process and came out the other side of it," I say. "Good. Clean. Strange in a way that feels correct."
A pause. "And the three of them."
"Also alive," I say.
"Jennifer."
"They were good," I say. "They took care of me."
I hear her breathe in slowly, the particular breath she does when she is revising an assessment. "Okay," she says.
"Anna," I say. "They want to raise the baby, together. They want to bond."
The silence on the other end of the line is the productive kind, the kind Anna makes when she is thinking rather than reacting.
"And what do you want?" she says.
"The same I think," I say.
She is quiet for a moment. Then she says, "tell me everything."
Anna listens as I spill it all, even down to me coming into the guest house today.
"Okay," she says. "I want to meet them."
"You will. Come when the baby arrives. But that's if we'll still be here then. We may have to go to the city."
"It sounds like you've made up your mind," Anna says.
I guess she's right. I'm not thinking about bonding. I'm thinking about the future.
"Yes," I confess. "It's just that I don't want to hurt their business or anything else."
"Pack doesn't work that way. You'll be their omega. If you say to them stay here in paradise, they'll do that for you. The most important person in the relationship will be you. All they'll want to do is please you. Do you understand?"
I nod.
She laughs, warm and real, and the familiar sound of it moves through me like the first sip of something good on a cold morning. "Go," she says. "Tell them."
"I will."
"Jennifer."
"Yes."
"I'm glad," she says. Simple. Clean. The specific warmth of someone who has been worrying about you for a long time and has just set the worry down.