Later that afternoon, Peter had watched through the open doorway of her childhood bedroom. He saw us sitting on the edge of her twin bed, surrounded by old posters of bands and sketches she'd done years ago. We had escaped for a few hours that day. We'd walked along the river, huddled together against the London wind, and even found a small, loud basement show in a pub where the music was so loud it drowned out the need to talk. For those few hours, we were just two teenagers in love, lost in the noise.

But then, the return to the house. The mug was still sitting on the counter, unwashed.

"I don't think they'll ever like him," she had whispered to Peter in the hallway, glancing back at where I was looking at her old school photos.

"They don't have to like him," Peter had replied, his hand resting on her shoulder. "They just have to get out of the way."

Back in the cottage, the documentary on the TV had moved on to the Arctic. Peter took a sip of his tea; it was stone cold. He looked at the two of us on the sofa. I had shifted in my sleep, my arm draped protectively across the swell of her stomach. We looked so young it hurt his teeth.

He thought about the "decision." He remembered the night in July, just after the Polperro trip, when the news had first broken. The screaming phone calls from London. The way she had hidden in the bathroom of the cottage, her voice fracturing into three different people, terrified that she wasn't "whole" enough to be a mother.

And he remembered how I'd sat on the floor outside that door for four hours, talking to whoever was listening on the other side, until the door finally opened.

The parents saw a disaster. Peter saw a miracle of stubbornness.

He looked at the calendar on the wall. February 7th was circled in a faint, pencilled hand. It felt like a deadline and a coronation all at once.

He stood up quietly, the floorboards groaning under his weight, and draped a thick wool blanket over the both of us. He tucked it in at the corners, making sure our feet were covered.

He turned off the TV. The darkness of the South Wales valley swallowed the room, leaving only the dying embers of the fire to watch over the house.

The morning in Crosskeys didn't start with an alarm; it started with the low, rhythmic thud of the pipes in the walls and the smell of toasted bread drifting up through the floorboards. The light that filtered through the small cottage windows was a pale, watery silver. It wasn't the aggressive, demanding sun of London that highlighted every speck of dust on a mahogany table. This was Valley light—soft, forgiving, and slightly damp.