Going back to the way things had been before…hurt.
“Just focus on the baby,” she told herself beneath her breath as she tidied herself up, used the bathroom, and pulled her clothes back on. “On our son.”
And it was like those were magic words. Her son.Theirson.
A little boy who she could already, suddenly, envision as if he was standing there before her. Perhaps he would have the same dark green eyes she and her brother did, maybe even ringed with gold like his father’s. He was certain to have dark hair, and she wondered if he’d be born with that look of a stamped old coin, like all the generations of Calixtos who’d come before him, as if their history was so intense it showed on their cheeks.
She wondered if she’d see herself in him. Or perhaps she’d see her mother—like the beautiful ghost she sometimes seemed to glimpse out of the corner of her eye when she turned away from a mirror.
A little boy, she thought, letting the joy of that wash through her as she walked out of the exam room. She smiled when she saw Dr. Assumpció in the outer office.
“Pau has gone on ahead,” the other woman told her. “I believe he’s pulling the car around. But I have to tell you, this is like a miracle.”
Leontina laughed. “I assure you it is not. We got pregnant in the very unmiraculous, usual way.”
Though it had felt a bit like a miracle to her, if she was honest. It still did. Every time.
Assumpció laughed, too. “I don’t mean that. Believe me, I know where babies come from. I mean Pau. I’ve never seen him like this.”
There was, of course, nothing on earth Leontina wanted to hear more than stories about how Pau was besotted with her and a changed man in every regard, but she really didn’t think that was the case.
Still, she couldn’t help but smile and lean a little closer. “Like what?” she asked. “Married, you mean?”
“That part, sure,” Assumpció said, laughter in her gaze. “And his choice of bride is fascinating, of course. I knew that he was friends with your brother at university, but we all thought that he cut Giaco off years ago because of his…” She clearly recalled who she was speaking to and abruptly cut herself off. “They are very different people, is what I mean to say.”
“Indeed they are,” Leontina agreed.
Pau’s cousin looked faintly flustered, now. “I seem to be stumbling left and right, and I already have a foot in my mouth. Possibly both feet.” She inclined her head. “All I want to say is that the only thing I’ve ever known Pau to be intense about, and intently focused on, is the vineyard. When we were kids, I always thought he would have burned every vine to the ground if he could, but everything changed after my uncle died. Pau became obsessed with the company. To a concerning degree. I’m both surprised and delighted that he’s broadened his scope. That’s all I meant.”
“That is how I received it,” Leontina assured her. “Why do you think he changed so dramatically?”
Maybe it was a foolish question to ask his cousin. Or too intimate when she’d only just met the woman. But Assumpció nodded as if it was a reasonable follow-up.
“My mother and I have always believed that it is the only way he can feel close to Bernat now,” she said quietly. “By loving what his father loved, perhaps?” The other woman smiled. “But you know him far better, I think. You would be better equipped to know the truth of this.”
Leontina’s mind was spinning as she left the office and made her way out the old, cobbled street, where Pau stood beside the gleaming SUV he’d driven here.
Because she wasn’t sure that she did know Pau better than his cousin. And she thought that she should. More than that, she wanted—desperately—to know him inside and out, the way she knew his body now.
It felt like a kind of madness to want someone this much.
She felt the moment his gaze landed on her, and all that dark focus of his centered on her alone, as if they were entirely isolated on this Spanish street when she knew they were not. Just like the first time, just like every time, it was like being struck by lightning. Leontina smiled, and as she did, had the overwhelming sense that everything was changed now. That she was walking out of that office a different woman from the one who’d walked in.
When the baby moved inside her, she understood.
Up until this moment, she’d been pregnant. It had been something that was happening to her, though she spoke to the baby and sang it songs—but most of her thoughts about the future were loose. Vague. She’d been a pregnant woman carrying a child who was still mostly abstract.
Today she’d become a mother. Just as Pau had become a father. They had become the parents of the little boy they would meet in just under half a year from now.
It was all a good deal more real than it had seemed this morning. Their son had taken shape, and in so doing, changed the shape of everything around him.
No wonder this all felt sacred.
No wonder this need toknowthe man she shared her body and her child with felt so desperate.
Pau did not speak. Leontina could feel all that electricity simmering in him and crackling in her, too, as he opened the passenger door for her. Then he took her hand as he helped her inside, though she didn’t require assistance. She thought she might have refused it on any other day.
But today was special.
