Peter carried the phone into the living room, the cord trailing behind him like a lifeline. He placed the receiver gently against her ear, and I heard the shift in the static—the sound of the room changing, the fire crackling, her breathing close and uneven.

"Hey," I said. "I'm here."

"I'm sorry," she whispered. "I scared Peter."

"Peter doesn't scare," I said, though my own hands were shaking. "Peter is made of the same stuff as those mountains. You'd need a geological event to rattle him."

A small, watery laugh. "He found me in Newbridge. I don't even know where Newbridge is."

"It's north," I said. "Above Abercarn. Peter told me. It's got a nice memorial hall, apparently."

"He would know that." A pause. Then, quieter: "I keep thinking I'm going to lose her. Not the baby—myself. The version of me that knows how to be a mother. What if she goes away and doesn't come back?"

I closed my eyes. The library around me—the fluorescent lights, the smell of old paper and radiator dust, the hum of Swedish efficiency—fell away. I was back in the cottage, sitting on the floor outside the bathroom door in July, talking to three different voices through the wood. I was back in the pub garden in Cardiff, watching her draw ivy growing into my shoulders. I was back at the beginning.

"She always comes back," I said. "You always come back. That's the thing about you—all of you. You find your way home."

I heard her breathing slow, the rhythm steadying like a tide settling after a storm. Peter was somewhere in the background—I could hear the faint clink of him washing up, giving us the illusion of privacy while staying close enough to catch anything that fell.

After she'd fallen asleep with the phone still pressed to her ear, Peter's voice came back on the line, low and gruff.

"She's out," he said. "Sleeping. I'll keep the fire going."

"Thank you, Peter."

"Don't thank me. Just get yourself back here in one piece. She needs you more than she'll ever say, and you know it."

I hung up and sat in the silence of the Swedish library. The fluorescent light above my desk buzzed like an insect trapped in amber. Outside the tall windows, the November dark of Scandinavia pressed against the glass—flat, absolute, nothing like the textured darkness of the Valleys with its layers of fog and hillside and hidden rivers.

The worry didn't leave. It just settled into a different shape—a familiar one, worn smooth by repetition, like a stone carried in a pocket. Because this wasn't the first time. This wasn't even close to the first time.

My mind reached back—past the cottage, past Polperro, past the summer—to a night almost a year earlier. Before the pregnancy. Before Peter. Before Wales. Before I had any understanding of what was happening inside her head.