Page 100 of Property of the Bikers

The changing table came on Saturday.

The mobile that Maya picked out, with small wooden animals turning slowly on a white cord, went up on Sunday.

I stand in the doorway of the nursery this morning and look at the room that is almost ready for a person who isn’t here yet, and something moves in my chest that I don’t have a clean word for.

Mira got a message from Dmitri on Monday. I know because she told me, the same way she tells me things now, directly and without preamble, sitting at the kitchen table while I made coffee.

“Dmitri emailed,” she said.

“What did he say?” I ask.

“Heard Viktor’s gone. You’re safe. That’s all I wanted.”

I poured the coffee and put a cup in front of her, and sat down.

“You respond?” I said.

“No,” she said.

She picked up the cup.

I didn’t push it. There was nothing to push. She made her decision about Dmitri. She hasn’t revisited it, and she’s not going to. Former family is its own category, and it stays there.

We drank the coffee.

That was the end of it.

* * *

Doc’s appointment on Wednesday puts everything where it needs to be.

Mira is thirty-eight weeks. Baby’s weight is good. Position is correct. Blood pressure, which has been elevated since week three of the compound, is at the lowest reading Doc has recorded since she arrived. He writes the number on the clipboard and looks at it, and looks at her.

“Whatever you’re doing,” he says, “keep doing it.”

Mira looks at the number. “The siege ending helped,” she says.

“I imagine it did,” he says.

He sends her home with instructions to rest, eat regularly, and return in five days unless something changes before then.

She walks back across the compound in the afternoon light with Maya beside her, and I watch from the workshop doorway, not obviously, the way I watch most things.

She moves differently than she did when she arrived. Not just the pregnancy, though that’s more visible every week. Something in the way she carries herself inside the compound, like a woman who’s walking through a place that belongs to her, not a woman who’s navigating a place she’s been permitted to occupy.

It took a while.

It’s there now.

* * *

The parenting plan comes together over two evenings at the kitchen table.

Reeve writes it out because Reeve writes things out in the clean, sequential way he structures everything. Overnight rotation between the three of us, flexible based on operational demands, but with a baseline that doesn’t require Mira to manage alone.

Doc on call for the first three months. Maya available as backup. The main house layout adjusted so the nursery is accessible from all three of our quarters without going through shared spaces in the night.

Cade reads through it twice and signs off without changes, which means he’d already run it in his head before Reeve put it on paper.