Within an hour, the three of us had gravitated to the living room. The blue glow of the television flickered against the stone walls—some nature documentary about the migration of birds that none of us were actually watching. She had fallen asleep almost instantly, her head pillowed on my shoulder, her breathing heavy and rhythmic. My own eyes gave up shortly after, my chin resting on the crown of her head, the scent of her shampoo—something herbal and cheap from a Newport chemist—the last thing I registered.

Peter stayed awake. He always did. He was the sentry.

He sat in the worn armchair, a mug of tea cradled in his hands, watching the two of us. To anyone else, we looked like two kids playing house. To him, we looked like a shipwreck.

His mind drifted back to three days ago. London.

The memory didn't come back in a straight line; it came back in the sound of a silver spoon tapping against a porcelain saucer. Clink. Clink. Clink.

Her mother had been sitting in that sun-drenched breakfast nook in Greenwich, the kind of room designed to make people feel small. She had pushed a mug across the table toward her daughter—a chipped, blue ceramic thing that looked wildly out of place among the bone china. It had "World's Okayest Daughter" printed on it in fading block letters.

It had been a joke once. A birthday gag from a few years prior when things were simpler. But sitting there, with the weight of the pregnancy and the "situation" hanging in the air, the joke had curdled. It wasn't a sweet irony anymore; it felt like a verdict.

"We just want you to consider the options," her father had said, his voice as smooth and cold as a river stone. He hadn't looked at me. He never did if he could help it. "At seventeen, life is a very long road. It's a shame to start it with such a heavy pack."

Peter remembered standing by the window of that Greenwich house, looking out at the Thames in the distance, feeling like a bodyguard at a funeral.

"The pack is already there, Arthur," Peter had said, his voice grating against the polished silence of the room. "The question isn't how heavy it is. The question is who's helping her carry it."

The look her mother gave Peter could have wilted a garden. "We are her parents, Peter. We are the ones thinking about her stability. Her... wellness."

The word 'wellness' had been a pointed jab. They knew. They didn't have the language for it—they didn't understand the shifts, the lost time, the way her eyes changed when someone else was 'out'—but they used her fragility as a reason to doubt her choice. They spoke about the "decision" to keep the baby as if it were a symptom of a fever that would eventually break.