He doesn’t have to.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Her scent has been shifting since the nesting began,” he says. The observation is delivered in the same calm tone he uses for everything else. “It’s stronger.”
I glance toward Maya.
I've been noticing it for hours. “Her heat is close.”
Elias nods once.
I look at Maya again, at the hand resting open against the blanket, and finally say what I've been thinking since she stopped crying. “She settles fastest when all three of us are nearby.”
Elias is quiet for a moment. “Yes,” he says. “That's true.”
That's all he gives me. He doesn't analyze it or speculate about what it means. He simply acknowledges it the way he acknowledges any other fact.
I want to ask him something, but it takes me a moment to figure out how to phrase it.
“She’s going to panic,” I say eventually. “When it actually hits.”
Elias considers that. “Possibly.”
“She barely got through the flare tonight, and the flares are getting stronger.” I run my thumb along the edge of the blanket beside me, just to give my hands something to do. “The heat is going to be significantly more intense than that. She’s never gone through one before, and her presentation was late, which means—”
“Which means the heat will likely be more intense,” Elias says. He doesn't soften the truth.
“I keep running through the math on whether we're actually prepared,” I admit. “Whether I researched enough. Whether the supplies are—”
I stop myself.
Then try again.
“I've been through the kit three times.”
“I know,” he says. “I watched you.”
I look over at him.
His expression is calm in the low light. “You check things when you're worried,” he says. “The same way other people pace.”
I don't deny it.
“What she'll need most,” he says, “is to keep feeling like she has choices. Through all of it. If she panics, it won't be because we ran out of cooling packs.”
He's right.
I know he's right.
It doesn't make the inventory list in my head stop.
“She still doesn’t fully believe she gets to be here,” I say. I mean here in this house. Here with us. Here in the nest she built with her own hands and didn’t recognize for what it was until she was already standing in the middle of it. “She’s getting closer, but shekeeps waiting for the other shoe to drop. She keeps waiting for this to make sense in a way she can dismiss.”
Elias watches Maya for a moment. “She chose this tonight. Consciously.”
“I know.”
“That’s different from every other time.” He’s talking about the kitchen flare, the first night at her apartment, and all the other moments when instinct pushed her toward us before she had the chance to decide what she wanted. Tonight she cried, let herself be held, and didn’t try to explain any of it away.
