We sat there for a long time after the fish and chips were gone, the greasy paper crumpled on the tray. We talked about names that felt like the sea in Polperro and names that felt like the stone of Crosskeys. We didn't settle on one—not yet—but the fear that had followed us from Greenwich seemed to have stayed outside in the drizzle. Inside the Fish Bar, the three of us were a closed loop.

"February," she murmured, resting her head on my shoulder. "It's going to be a long winter."

"Good," I said, kissing the top of her head. "I've always liked the winter."

Peter drove us out of Newport and toward Cardiff the next Saturday. He'd mentioned needing to "sort some things out" with an old friend, but I suspected he was giving us space. The plan was to drop us at the market while he disappeared for a few hours.

He left us outside the covered market with a twenty-pound note and instructions not to "buy anything alive or cursed," then Vera coughed her way back into the Saturday traffic and was gone.

We wandered through the market for an hour, drifting between stalls of second-hand books and cheap jewelry, her fingers running over everything like she was reading braille. She bought a tiny knitted hat from an old woman who told her, without being asked, that the baby would have "a head for music." I bought a bag of Welsh cakes that were still warm, the sugar clinging to the paper like frost.

By midday, the drizzle had thickened into something more committed, and we ducked down a narrow side street where a hand-painted sign read The Old Arcade above a doorway that looked like it hadn't been repainted since the war. Inside, the pub was small and warm, the air heavy with the smell of hops and wood polish. But it was the back that drew us—a walled beer garden, barely bigger than Peter's kitchen, with a canvas awning stretched overhead that turned the rain into a soft, constant drumroll.

We had the garden entirely to ourselves. Two mismatched wooden chairs, a table with a cigarette burn shaped like a crescent moon, and a hanging basket of ivy that had given up on growing upward and was now trailing across the wall like green cursive. She ordered a lemonade; I ordered a half of bitter that I was technically too young to buy, but the barman had looked at the bump beneath her jumper and at my face and apparently decided we'd earned it.

"You look very Welsh right now," she said, watching me take the first sip. "Sitting in a garden in the rain, drinking warm beer, looking thoughtful. All you need is a flat cap and a grudge against the English."