CHAPTER 62
Brynn
Messini, Greece
Five Months Gone
At twenty-one weeks, there was no mistaking that I was pregnant.
How pregnant was less obvious.
The curve of my stomach showed beneath almost everything now, but it was still smaller than I thought five months gone should look.
A loose dress could soften it. The right angle could shave weeks off.
From the front, I was obviously carrying a baby.
From across a room, no one could’ve said with certainty how far along I was.
That should’ve been convenient.
Instead, it scared me.
Eleni had told me not to compare. The baby was measuring where she should. Her heartbeat was strong. Every number from the ultrasound had landed inside the range it was supposed to.
I knew all of that.
I still stood sideways in the cottage mirror every morning, one hand beneath the curve, searching for proof that she had grown overnight.
Some women carried small, especially with their first.
That was normal.
So was worrying, apparently.
Whenever one of the village women looked at my stomach and insisted I needed to eat more, the reassurance wore thinner. I started wondering if they could see something I couldn’t. If I was doing something wrong. If my body wasn’t giving her enough.
That was ridiculous.
Marina, Leo, and his mother treated feeding me like a shared responsibility assigned to them. I couldn’t cross a room without someone putting bread, fruit, or honey in my hand. There was no possibility that either of us was going hungry.
Still, worry had never required evidence.
Then she would move, a faint press or flutter beneath my hand, and I could breathe again.
The old women in the village did nothing to help.
They touched my belly any chance they got like it was public property blessed by God, bees, and possibly local government.
Marina told me to stop looking offended.
I told her I would when strangers stopped petting me like a rescue goat.
She laughed so hard she had to sit down.
That was the thing about Greece.
It kept making me laugh when I least expected it.
Not constantly or in a way that fixed anything.
But enough.
Enough that some mornings I woke up and reached for the day before the grief reached for me. Enough that I could walk through the village with my hand low on my belly and not feel like I was fleeing. The road to Bouka Beach had even started to feel familiar beneath my feet.
Somewhere along the way, I had stopped being the stranger staying in Leo’s cottage and become the pregnant woman who labeled honey badly, knew which baker saved the sesame bread for Marina, and was expected to appear whenever half the village decided the olives needed sorting.
Leo had gone down to the water before sunrise that morning, and I walked to Bouka Beach later while he took the skiff out.
The road curved past the edge of the olive groves and opened toward the beach, where the tide moved like it didn’t have anything to prove. The breeze came in low and warm, tugging at the hem of my sundress as I lowered myself into the shade above the rocks.
Slowly, because the ground was uneven and my balance had become just unreliable enough to annoy me.
I opened my journal in my lap, wrote half a sentence, then stopped.
The sea made things quiet in my head. It slowed everything down.
I watched the water instead.
Leo was down by the shoreline, barefoot, loading a net into the skiff like he had done it a hundred times. Probably because he had. His shirt was off, draped over one shoulder, his movements clean and efficient without ever turning showy.
He pushed the skiff into the water like he belonged there. Like the sea trusted him more than the shore ever had.
I wondered what it felt like to know so completely where you belonged. To move toward something without hesitation because every part of you recognized it as home.
Leo never had to ask the sea if it would keep him.
Then he was gone, just a line against the blue.
I looked back down at the journal.
The half-finished sentence waited for me.
I put the pen to the page and kept writing.
By the time I stopped, the words had blurred.
For one second, I almost tore the page out.
I didn’t.
I closed the journal before what I’d written could pull me all the way under.
The sea was still moving.
The world hadn’t stopped because I missed him.
It never did.
That was both the cruelty and the mercy of it.
I wiped one tear from the back of my hand before it reached my wrist, then rested my palm over the curve of my stomach.
The baby shifted beneath it.
A slow roll low in my belly, stronger than the fluttering movements from only a few weeks ago.
Like she had opinions.
She got that from me.
Probably.
Maybe.
God help us if she got it from both of us.
By the time I saw the boat again, the sun had shifted higher and warmed the rocks beneath my sandals. Leo was a dark shape cutting back toward shore. No motor. Just rhythm and water and time.
He pulled up near the rocks and stepped out barefoot, the hem of his shorts soaked to mid-thigh. He didn’t say anything at first. He set the net down, half-full with silver flashes still twitching in the sun, and looked at me.
He reached down and offered his hand.
I hesitated, then took it.
He didn’t pull. He just anchored, letting me shift my weight against his arm as I stood. Sitting on the rocks had left a dull ache low in my back, one more minor betrayal my body had added to the list.
“Ready to head home?” he asked.
I nodded.
He didn’t let go until I was steady.
He grabbed the fish with one hand and his shirt with the other, then led the way toward the truck like it was just another day.
Maybe it was.
Maybe that was why it hurt.
My balance had begun to shift in small, irritating ways.
Everything had.
***
I didn’t go up to the main house for dinner that night.
My back still ached from the rocks, my sandals had started to feel too tight, and the baby had spent most of the drive home pressing insistently against one side of my stomach.
I told Leo I wanted to stay at the cottage.
So he brought dinner to me.
That was Leo.
He never turned kindness into a grand gesture or made it heavy enough that I had to carry it too. He brought fish from the beach, bread from his mother, honey-laced tea, and two plates balanced between us on the porch while the light softened over the olive grove.
For a while, we ate without saying much.
The air smelled like salt and thyme. The cottage windows were open behind us. Somewhere uphill, his family laughed at something I couldn’t hear clearly enough to understand.
Leo leaned back in his chair, one ankle crossed over the other, his gaze on the horizon.
I knew him well enough by then to know when his quiet had meaning.
His eyes dropped briefly to my hand.
To the ring I still wore.
Then he asked, “Is he dead?”
I looked over at him.
He wasn’t pushing or accusing. Just asking the question no one here had asked because everyone had been kind enough to wait for me to offer up my grief.
I set my fork down. “No.”
The word came out before I knew if I believed it.
I took a breath. “No. He’s not dead.”
A pause caught in my throat. “I don’t think.”
The admission scraped on the way out.
Leo nodded like he had already made peace with that answer before he asked.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again,” I said. “I don’t know if he’s looking. Or even if he can.”
The words hurt less than they used to.
Or maybe I was just better at bleeding quietly.
Leo turned the tea glass between his hands. “I ask because if you needed someone beside you, for you and the baby, I would be there.”
My throat tightened.
He kept his eyes on the glass. “No questions. Nothing expected from you. Only if that was what you wanted.”
He wasn’t pressuring me or staking a claim. He was opening a door carefully enough that I could close it without hurting him.
That nearly broke me more than if he had asked for something.
I reached over and rested my hand on his arm.
“Leo,” I said softly. “You don’t know how much that means to me. Really.”
His eyes stayed on mine.
I looked down at my hand on his arm. Then at the ring on my finger.
“But I’m not trying to replace him.”
“I know,” he said.
His answer came easily, without any trace of disappointment I would have to soften or manage.
He meant it.
I drew my hand back. “And I’m not waiting in place either. I’m building something here, even if I don’t know how long I get to keep it.”
He nodded once, taking that in.
“I’m okay,” I said. “Or I’m getting there. I can do this on my own.”
The baby moved then, a slow stretch along one side of my stomach, and I put one hand over the spot.
“But I haven’t been alone here,” I added. “Not really.”
Leo let the silence sit between us, honest without becoming awkward.
“Your family has become some of the most important people in my life,” I said.
My fingers tightened once around the edge of my dress.
I let it mean what it meant.
I held his gaze. “That’s not nothing.”
After a few moments, he nodded.
Then he reached for the tea and passed it to me without a word.
The glass was warm against my palms.
I took it.
Below us, the olive trees moved softly in the dusk. The sea was hidden now, but I knew where it was. I could feel the direction of it. The pull.
Some things could be out of sight and still real.
I was learning that too.