CHAPTER 59
Brynn
Messini, Greece
Three Months Gone
The mornings in Messini had a rhythm I didn’t trust at first.
Soft light spread over the olive trees. Bees hummed somewhere beyond the cottage walls. From the main house up the hill came the low, distant sound of Leo’s family moving through their day like people who’d never expected the world to punish them for staying in one place.
I woke every morning like I’d been dropped there by mistake.
I checked the window latches before I brushed my teeth. Checked the lock before I made tea. Checked the road before I stepped outside.
I kept my bag packed beneath the bed for two weeks, the straps facing outward, because apparently pregnancy didn’t make me less dramatic about exits.
Leo never commented on it.
Neither did Marina.
That was probably why I started breathing there.
Not well. Not all the way. But enough.
I still wrote.
Nothing with buried accounts, powerful names, or questions someone might kill to keep unanswered.
I wrote short pieces under different names for small international magazines that needed regional filler.
Tourism. Recipes. Olive harvests. Village markets.
All the ways Greek women insisted thyme honey could fix whatever was wrong with you.
It wasn’t journalism. Not really.
But it paid a little, and for a few hours at night, with my notebook open beside the cottage window, I could pretend I was still someone who knew how to turn the world into words.
Writing dulled the itch. It didn’t satisfy the part of me that needed somewhere to go, something useful to do with my hands, or a reason to leave the cottage that wasn’t another careful walk down the same road.
That was why I accepted Leo’s offer to help at his family’s shop before I had time to convince myself staying hidden meant never leaving the cottage at all.
The storefront sat on the corner of a stone courtyard in Kalamata, whitewashed like everything else, with pale wooden shelves, hand-painted signs, and beeswax soap tied in raffia ribbon.
The first morning Leo drove me there, I stared at it through the windshield and decided immediately that it was too pretty to be useful.
Then he handed me a jar of honey.
“You don’t have to talk to anyone,” Leo said. “Just shadow Marina. She knows everything.”
“She knows everything?”
His expression stayed serious. “Most things. She exaggerates the rest.”
That was how I really got to know Marina.
She was my age or close to it, with dark hair pinned up in a clip and fast English softened by enough accent to make every sentence feel like it had taken the scenic route.
She moved through the shop like she’d been born between shelves of olive oil and jars of thyme honey, one hand writing prices while the other rearranged soap towers before they could offend her.
Marina gave me a clipboard and pointed toward the back. “Labels. Easy. Quiet. No customers unless you want them.”
“I love being assigned to a shelf.”
Her mouth twitched. “Good. The shelf has high standards.”
So I labeled jars.
Honey first. Then olive oil. Then small glass bottles of something herb-infused and expensive-looking that I didn’t ask too many questions about because the labels were in Greek and my brain had room for exactly four things at a time.
Jar. Label. Shelf. Breathe.
The repetition helped.
It gave my hands something to do while the rest of me tried not to remember Poland. Whitaker. The video. Jameson tied to a chair, blood spreading across his shirt on a screen I couldn’t reach.
Sometimes grief hit like that.
Without warning. Without permission.
One second, I was aligning labels on jars of wildflower honey. The next, I was back in that rented house, standing in front of a man who knew exactly how to make leaving feel like ripping out my own heart.
I dropped a jar during my third week.
Not far. Not hard enough to break. It tipped sideways, struck the wooden table, and rolled toward the edge before Marina caught it.
Her hand closed around the glass, quick and sure. “Sit.”
“I’m fine.”
She set the jar safely on the table. “Everyone says that when they’re not.”
Rude.
Accurate, but rude.
I sat.
She put a piece of bread in front of me and a small dish of honey beside it. Then she left me alone, which was the kindest thing anyone could’ve done.
By the end of the month, the shop had become something I understood.
Not home. I wasn’t ready to give anything that word.
But rhythm.
Mornings with Marina. Afternoons in the back room labeling bottles or tying ribbon around soap.
Old women who came in for olive oil and patted my hand like they’d decided I belonged to the village whether I’d agreed to it or not.
Leo appearing in the doorway with crates, invoices, or coffee I didn’t ask for and drank anyway.
Greece was charming. I could see why people came here and never wanted to leave.
I might’ve felt the same.
If Jameson could’ve been there with me.
I was halfway through a tray of olive oil bottles when Leo appeared in the doorway. “Brynn.”
I looked up.
He wasn’t smiling.
My hand stilled over the label.
“Eleni is here,” he said gently.
He didn’t need to explain.
For one ridiculous second, I considered pretending I didn’t understand what Leo meant. Like if I kept labeling bottles, the entire situation might politely reschedule itself.
Marina took the bottle from me. “Come.”
I followed.
The back room smelled sweet, mingled with cardboard and sun-heated glass. Eleni sat beside the small worktable with her hands folded over a canvas bag in her lap.
She was older than my grandmother had been when I lost her. Maybe seventy. Her silver hair was braided low, and her skin had the soft, weathered look of a woman who’d spent a lifetime under real sun.
Eleni said something in Greek.
I looked at Marina.
“She says you can sit,” Marina translated. “And breathe.”
“I am breathing.”
Marina gave me a look.
Eleni opened her bag and removed a folded cloth, a notebook, a blood pressure cuff, and several things I didn’t recognize.
She took my hand and spoke softly.
Marina stayed beside the door. “She says there will be no records. No names you don’t want written. Nothing leaves the clinic unless you say.”
My throat tightened.
I nodded because words were suddenly above my pay grade.
Eleni turned my palm over, studied it like it might tell her something, then smiled faintly and laid my hand over my stomach.
She asked another question.
I didn’t understand the words, but I caught the rhythm.
First?
I nodded.
Her face softened.
Then she got to work.
Gentle hands. Quiet instructions. Marina translating only when necessary. Blood pressure. Pulse. Questions about nausea, pain, bleeding, dizziness. How long since my last period. How sure was I. When had I first suspected?
I answered as best I could.
When she finished, she wrote something in her notebook, then spoke to Marina for longer this time.
Marina listened carefully before looking at me. “She thinks you’re farther along than you believed. Maybe sixteen weeks. Maybe seventeen.”
The room went very quiet.
I stared at her.
Then I covered my face and nodded.
Because I knew.
God help me, I knew.
Eleni waited, steady as stone.
After a moment, she spoke again.
Marina’s voice softened. “She says everything she sees right now seems good. The clinic is in the next town. Small and quiet. She knows the doctor. They can do a scan. Nothing formal. Just a look.”
A look.
A real image.
I nodded again.
Eleni smiled and touched my shoulder with two fingers.
I didn’t know why that made my eyes burn.
***
Leo drove me to the clinic the next morning.
He didn’t ask if I wanted him to. He didn’t insist either. He only appeared outside the cottage with the car washed, the passenger seat pushed back farther than usual, and a paper bag filled with bread still warm from his mother’s kitchen.
The clinic was tucked behind a market in the next town.
Pale blue shutters. Clean white stone. A narrow hall that smelled faintly of lemon and soap. Nothing like the sterile, fluorescent nightmare I’d imagined.
Leo parked at the curb and came around to open my door.
He didn’t follow me inside.
“I’ll be here,” he said.
“I know.”
His gaze moved briefly to the clinic entrance, then returned to me. “Take as long as you need.”
Eleni was already waiting by the doors.
She hugged me lightly, spoke quickly with the woman at the desk, and led me down a short hall into a small exam room. A curtain shifted over the half-open window. A fan turned in the corner, pushing warm air in slow circles. Somewhere down the hallway, a baby cried and was hushed.
I sat on the edge of the bed.
The paper crinkled beneath me.
Eleni spoke to the nurse.
The nurse looked at me. “She wants to know if you’re ready.”
No.
Absolutely not.
“Yes.”
Eleni helped me lie back and lifted my shirt with the same practical gentleness she did everything else. The gel was cold when it touched my skin, and my breath caught.
Then the wand moved.
The screen flickered.
For a second, there was nothing.
Gray shadow. Static. A shape that could’ve been anything.
Then the image settled.
A curve.
A spine.
A tiny head.
Movement.
My whole body stopped.
Eleni said something softly and pointed to the screen.
The nurse stood near my head. “She says everything looks good. You’re measuring around seventeen weeks. Good, strong heartbeat.”
Seventeen weeks.
A sound filled the room a moment later.
Fast. Steady.
Alive.
Eleni studied the screen, then spoke to the nurse again.
The nurse looked at me. “She thinks she can tell the sex, if you want to know.”
My hand tightened around the edge of the bed.
“Yes.”
Eleni shifted the wand and pointed.
The nurse smiled. “She believes it’s a girl. The baby is giving us a clear view.”
A girl.
My throat closed so hard it hurt.
Jameson should be here for this.
I shouldn’t have been in that room alone, in a clinic behind a market in Greece, with the father of my daughter somewhere I couldn’t reach.
Maybe alive.
Maybe not.
Maybe looking for me.
Maybe still bleeding while I kept driving farther away.
The pressure in my chest became too much to hide.
Eleni took my hand.
I didn’t need translation for what came next.
For a few minutes, there was only the screen.
The shape.
The movement.
The heartbeat.
I stared until my vision blurred.
I kept one hand on my stomach like I could hold the baby there through sheer will. Like if I let go, the world would remember it had taken everything else from me and come back for this too.
Eleni printed the image.
The machine made a soft mechanical sound, absurdly ordinary for something that felt like proof of God, biology, and terrible timing all at once.
She tore the image free and handed it to me.
I held it with both hands.
A blur.
A shadow.
A person.
Mine.
The tears slipped free before I could stop them, blurring the image in my hands.
I cried into the side of my hand while Eleni sat beside me and didn’t try to stop it.
That was probably why I could.
***
By the time I got home, the light was turning soft over the olive grove.
Gold caught in the leaves and flashed silver whenever the wind moved through them. The cottage was quiet when I unlocked the door. Too quiet at first, until I remembered quiet wasn’t always a warning there.
Sometimes it was just quiet.
I made myself eat because Eleni had given me a look that required no translation.
Bread. Cheese. Tomato. A few olives I was beginning to suspect might be responsible for keeping the entire country emotionally stable.
Then I carried the plate outside and sat on the small stone patio while the air cooled.
The sea was visible between the rooftops in the distance.
Quiet. Endless.
I reached into my bag and pulled out the notebook I’d bought from the market near the shop earlier that week.
Simple. Unlined. A soft leather cover worn at the edges, like it had belonged to someone before me and survived the experience.
I opened it to the first page.
For a minute, I didn’t write.
I only looked at the ultrasound photograph beside me.
Then I picked up the pen.
Little Bit,
I saw you today.
You were mostly static and shadow, but then you moved, and there you were. Not an idea. Not a fear. Not a secret I was carrying.
You.
I heard your heartbeat. Fast, stubborn, and completely unimpressed by everything that came before it.
I don’t know how to make the world safe enough for you. I don’t know how to stop being afraid that anything I love this much can be found and taken.
But I know I want you here.
You are wanted.
Not because this is easy. Not because I was ready.
Because you are you.
Today, the future had a spine, a heartbeat, and one small hand moving across a screen.
I love you.
The breeze shifted, carrying thyme and salt across the patio.
I set the pen down.
For a long time, I sat with the notebook open, one hand over my stomach and the ultrasound photograph beside the other.
Somewhere out there, everything had gone wrong.
But under the Greek sky, with the sea in the distance and the first proof of our child lying beside my hand, I could breathe.