CHAPTER 21
LIVIA
If you had asked me to run a long-term projection on my life three years ago, the model would not have included a shared mortgage on an Orc-scaled townhouse, a marriage certificate, or an aggressively enforced ban on standard-sized ceramics. The model definitely would not have included twins. But the thing nobody tells you about being pregnant with half-Orc twins is that your centre of gravity relocates to approximately three feet in front of your actual body, and your previously reliable sense of spatial awareness becomes a complete fiction.
I find this out definitively on a Tuesday morning in March when I miscalculate the distance between my stomach and the kitchen counter and send a full mug of decaf sliding off the edge. I watch it fall. I cannot bend fast enough to stop it. It hits the tile and shatters with a sound like a small, disappointed gunshot.
From the bedroom, Narod's voice arrives immediately, low and alert.
"Are you hurt?"
"The mug is hurt," I call back.
A pause. Then the sound of his feet on the hardwood, which I feel before I hear because at thirty-seven weeks pregnant my entire lower body has become a seismic monitoring system. Heappears in the kitchen doorway wearing his glasses and nothing else, already scanning the floor with the intensity he normally reserves for quarterly risk projections.
"Don't move," he says. "There's ceramic."
"I'm aware. I watched it happen."
He crosses the kitchen in three steps, steering me sideways by the shoulders with extraordinary care, then crouches to collect the shards with his bare hands because apparently that is easier for him than finding a dustpan, which is a choice I have stopped commenting on. I gaze at his head, the dark cropped hair, the broad green line of his shoulders. My stomach shifts. One of the boys adjusts, pressing a knee or a fist or possibly an entire foot into my right side, and I press back with two fingers, a conversation we have been having for weeks.
"Done," Narod says. He straightens, deposits the ceramic fragments in the bin, washes his hands, and turns to look at me with the expression he has been wearing for approximately the last three months, which I have privately catalogued as Calculated Concern With Undertones of Absolute Terror. "You should sit."
"I've been sitting. I sat for nine hours yesterday."
"Livia."
"The doctor said movement is good."
"The doctor said moderate movement." He pulls out the tall stool at the kitchen island, the one he had delivered specifically because it lets me sit upright without the particular misery of trying to lower myself into a normal chair, and looks at it pointedly. "Moderate. Not standing on tile floors in proximity to shatterable ceramics."
I sit on the stool. He refills the kettle. This is our life now, a constant, gentle negotiation between his need to wrap me in structural reinforcement and my need to maintain some functional dignity, conducted primarily through looks andcounter-offers and the occasional pointed deployment of the phrase the doctor said.
He hands me a fresh mug, decaf, and stands across the island watching me with the warm amber eyes that still do something embarrassing to my pulse even now, even at thirty-seven weeks, even at seven in the morning when I am wearing his oversized shirt because nothing else fits and my hair hasn't been brushed yet.
"The nursery," I say.
"Finished."
"You finished the second shelf bracket last night?"
"At eleven forty. I also replaced the mobile batteries and cross-referenced the installation torque on the crib hardware with the manufacturer specifications." He pauses. "The manufacturer specifications were inadequate. I applied a fifteen percent safety margin."
I look at him over the rim of my mug. "You stress-tested the crib."
"I load-tested it. There is a distinction."
"Did it pass?"
"Comprehensively."
I take a sip of my decaf, which is not coffee but has become precious to me by sheer proximity to the concept, and let myself sit for a moment in the specific quality of this quiet. His apartment, our apartment now, three months since I moved the last of my boxes and we reorganised the bookshelves to account for the combined weight of my complete collection of financial theory texts and his improbable stack of Orc cultural histories and the steadily expanding shelf of parenting books he has been cross-referencing with the focus of a man writing a doctoral thesis. High ceilings. Furniture scaled for him, which means I currently perch on everything like a child visiting agrandparent's house. The morning comes in gold through the east-facing windows.
My stomach tightens. Not a contraction, not yet, just the constant low-grade pressure of two small people who have absolutely run out of room and seem to be expressing their architectural frustration in real time.
"They're moving," I say.
Narod is around the island in under two seconds. He is not subtle about this and has entirely stopped pretending otherwise. He places one massive hand against the side of my stomach, flat and warm, with the practiced gentleness he has been refining since the first time he felt them move and went so still I thought for a moment he had stopped breathing. His face does something quiet and enormous.
