She shifted, wincing slightly. Her belly had been tightening all morning—practice contractions, Braxton Hicks, the midwife had called them. Her body rehearsing. Each time it happened, her stomach would go hard as stone for thirty seconds, a visible wave of tightening that moved across the surface. Then it would release, leaving her breathless and slightly stunned. "Not yet," she'd whisper to her belly. "But soon."

By the afternoon, the light began to fail, turning the room into a cavern of amber and long shadows. We sat together on the rug by the fire, the heat of the flames a welcome contrast to the frost creeping across the windowpanes. The conversation turned, as it often did these days, to the gravity of what was coming. We talked about the hospital, about Steph's promise to be there, and about the sheer, impossible scale of the love we already felt for someone we hadn't met.

The fire threw dancing shadows across the stone walls, making them seem to breathe. Near the hearth, the air shimmered with heat; further back, the cold pressed in from the windows. I could feel both at once—my face flushed and warm, my back chilled. The logs crackled and hissed as pockets of sap ignited, sending up brief flares of blue-green flame.

"How do you feel?" I asked, my voice low. "Not the 'tired' or the 'sore.' How do you feel... in here?" I touched my hand to my chest, then reached out to rest it on her stomach.

She didn't answer for a long time. She watched the embers pop and crack, her expression shifting through layers of thought. She wasn't drifting into the fog; she was diving deep into herself, looking for the right word to describe the architecture of her own soul after months of being the "fortress."

"In London," she began, her voice barely a whisper, "I felt like a puzzle with missing pieces. I felt like the 'others' were just echoes of things I'd lost. I was a problem to be solved, a diagnosis to be managed."

She looked at me, her eyes catching the firelight. "But here... with Peter, and Steph, and you... I don't feel like I'm breaking anymore. I feel like all the pieces are finally in the same room. Even the ones that are quiet, even the ones that are loud. They aren't fighting anymore. They're just... there."

She leaned her head back against the stone of the fireplace, a faint smile touching her lips. "I was reading that old book of yours—the one with the Hebrew translations Papa used to study. There's a word in there. Tamim."

I tilted my head, trying to recall the root of it. I knew the language was a part of her heritage she'd always held at a distance, something her parents treated as a relic rather than a living thing.

"What does it mean?" I asked.