"Vera didn't give up," Peter corrected through a mouthful of battered cod. "She was just protesting the incline. She's a city girl at heart. But you—I've never seen a Swede turn into a Cornish pirate so fast. You saw that water and I thought you were going to jump out of the moving car."

I laughed, the memory of the light hitting the turquoise water of the harbor still vivid in my mind. "I'd never seen a sea like that. In Sweden, it's all dark blues and cold iron. Polperro was like someone had dropped a bucket of emeralds into the Atlantic. I felt like I could breathe in all of it."

She was quiet for a moment, her fork idly tracing patterns in a pool of mushy peas. The "Polperro version" of her had been vibrant—a girl in a sundress with salt in her hair, before the Greenwich visit had tried to dim her.

As peter was about to say something, the bell above the door jingled. A young woman pushed a stroller inside, shaking a wet umbrella. A small toddler, barely two, tumbled out from under the rain cover, blinking sleepily and letting out a soft "Aww" as she saw the bright display of canned drinks.

We all stopped. The sight of the child—stumbling, curious, and utterly small—felt like a physical weight in the room. The toddler reached out a pudgy hand toward the counter, her mother laughing as she scooped her back up.

I looked at her, then down at the swell of her jumper. The "little bird" suddenly felt very real, no longer a concept or a "situation," but a person who would soon be stumbling across the floor of the cottage.

She reached across the table and took my hand, her fingers squeezing mine. "We haven't talked about names," she whispered. "Not really. Not since London."

In London, the talk of names had been clinical—names that sounded "respectable," names that would fit into a corporate ladder thirty years from now. But here, in the steam of the chip shop, those names felt like they belonged to strangers.

"Something that fits the light," I said, looking toward the window where the sun was trying, and failing, to pierce the Welsh mist. "Something that feels like it belongs to the hills. Like it grew here instead of being imported."

"Daffodil," she said, her voice teasing but with a thread of something serious underneath. "That's what Peter calls her anyway. Maybe we just stick with that."

"I'm not having my niece named after a vegetable," Peter scoffed, though he didn't look truly offended. "But she needs something bright. Something that doesn't mind the rain. Something proper Welsh, maybe. Or at least something that sounds good when you're shouting it across a valley, like."