"I've made you look like you belong here," she corrected, her voice quiet. "Like you grew here. Instead of arriving."

The words landed somewhere deep, in a place I hadn't known was waiting for them. I reached across the table and took her hand, the one still dusted with graphite. The pencil rolled off the sketchbook and onto the wet flagstones.

"I think I did grow here," I said. "Or at least, the version of me that matters did. The one that sits in pub gardens in the rain with you and eats Welsh cakes and doesn't need to be anywhere else."

She squeezed my fingers, her thumb tracing a small circle on my knuckle. "You know what I like about you?"

"My dramatic breathing?"

"No." She leaned forward, her forehead almost touching mine. The rain was so loud now it felt like the sky was applauding. "I like that you never try to fix me. Everyone else—my parents, the doctors, even Peter sometimes—they look at me like I'm a puzzle with missing pieces. But you just... sit with the gaps. Like they're part of the picture."

I kissed her then—softly, tasting lemonade and sugar and the particular sweetness of being seventeen and terrified and completely certain, all at once. Her hand came up to rest against my jaw, her fingers cold from the glass, and for a long, suspended moment, the world was just the two of us and the sound of rain on canvas.

When we pulled apart, she was laughing—that bright, startled laugh she had, as if joy kept catching her off guard.

"The baby kicked," she said, pressing my hand to the side of her stomach. "Right when you kissed me. I think she's either approving or complaining."

"She's approving," I said, feeling the faint, impossible flutter beneath my palm. "She has excellent taste. She gets it from me."

"She gets it from the Welsh cakes," she shot back, stealing the last one from the bag.

We stayed in that garden until the rain finally eased and the light turned a pale, watery gold. She drew two more sketches—one of the hanging basket, one of the crescent-moon burn on the table—and I read aloud from a water-damaged paperback I'd found on a shelf inside the pub, doing terrible accents for every character until she was crying with laughter, her hand clutching her bump as if to keep the little bird from shaking loose.

It was the kind of afternoon that felt stolen—borrowed from a life we hadn't quite earned yet but were determined to grow into. We were two teenagers in a beer garden in Cardiff, playing at being adults, and the beautiful, terrifying thing was that it wasn't a performance. It was the most real we'd ever been.

When Peter returned, three hours later, he had groceries and** something else—a large cardboard box that he refused to explain until we got back to the car.