I roll my eyes and turn a page.
"Walk on the beach later?" he says, already moving toward me.
"No," I say. "I want to stay here a while."
Tomas gets up from the armchair and crosses to me and presses a kiss to the top of my head, warm and unhurried, entirely his.
"I knew you would like it," he says.
He is right. He usually is.
Though if I am being honest with myself, which I am trying to be these days, it is not really the library or the window or the way the light sits differently here than anywhere else on the island. It is what the room holds right now. The three of them in it. The particular quality of an afternoon that belongs entirely to us with nothing asked of it.
I close the bird book on my finger.
I cannot think of a single thing I want more than exactly this.
34
JENNIFER
This morning, I woke up knowing I could go into labor any day, but I didn't expect it to be today. I felt the urge to bake bread, she felt the urge to leave my body.
I'm in the middle of the second prove, both hands on the counter, flour on my forearms, watching the dough do its quiet patient thing under the cloth, when she kicks.
Not the afternoon library kick or the this-food-is-right kick or the one she does when she has opinions about my posture. This one is different. Lower. It arrives alongside something that starts in my lower back and moves forward with the particular quality of something beginning rather than something simply happening.
I put both hands flat on the counter.
I breathe.
"All right," I say, to the kitchen, to the bread, to her. "All right then."
Carmen appears in the doorway in approximately four seconds with her phone already to her ear and her bergamot and clove scent sharp with the efficiency of someone who has had a plan ready for several weeks and is now executing it.
"Doctor is on her way," she says, and then, looking at my face: "Breathe, Jennifer."
"I am breathing," I say.
"But slower," she says, and disappears.
I stand at the counter and breathe slower and look at the bread and think about the fact that I have a birth plan. I wrote it three weeks ago with Tomas. It is laminated. Carmen has a copy. The doctor has a copy. There is a copy in the medical room. Tomas has the digital version in three separate locations because Tomas does not leave results to chance.
Yet, I can't remember a thing about it. Pregnancy brain, Anna warned me about this, it comes at any moment. I didn't think it would come just as I was ready to give birth.
No. This is a disaster. Everyone's here and all I'm doing is panicking.
All three of my alphas.
Tomas is already moving, crossing the kitchen. Matteo is in the doorway with his phone in his hand and his pale eyes taking in everything at once.
"The bread," I say to Santos as he looks just as shocked as I feel with his mouth wide open.
"It's in the second prove," I say. "It needs to go in the oven in twenty minutes. Two hundred degrees. Thirty minutes. Don't open the door."
Santos looks at the cloth on the bench. Then at me. Then back at the cloth. Something in his expression does the thing it does when he has stopped performing entirely and the real version of him comes through.
"I'll do it," he says.