Starting over-b

The bell over the diner door didn't ring so much as clatter, a tired metal sound that Donna kept saying she'd fix and never did. I'd learned the exact weight to push it so it wouldn't clatter twice.

Eight months. Eight months since the tree line, since Ada's hand digging into my arm, since I'd made the decision that same night before I let anyone talk me out of it. Eight months since I'd let myself think about any of it long enough to feel it.

"Table four's getting impatient," Donna called from behind the counter, not unkindly. She said everything without much heat in it, like she'd used up her urgency decades ago and had none left to spare.

"I'm going." I braced one hand against the small of my back and pushed up from the booth where I'd been catching five minutes off my feet. Nine months pregnant didn't leave much room for catching breath sitting down either, but it beat standing.

The bell clattered again. I didn't look up right away — I never did anymore, that reflex long since trained out of me, the part of my brain that used to snap toward every doorway expecting someone from a life I'd left behind. Millhaven didn't have anyone from that life. That was the entire point of it.

"Two coffees, whenever you get a chance," a voice said, and I recognized it as one of the regulars, and something in my shoulders eased.

I made it to table four. Took the order. Wrote it wrong the first time because Lena — I'd already started calling her that in my head, though I told myself it wasn't final, told myself I was still deciding — because she picked that exact moment to plant something solid against my ribs, and I had to stop and breathe through it with my pen hovering over the pad.

"You alright, hon?" The woman at the table, older, kind eyes, reached out like she might steady me.

"Fine." I smiled the way I'd practiced smiling here, easy, a little tired, nothing underneath it worth asking about. "She's just letting me know she's still in there."

"Not long now."

"No." I pressed a hand flat to the side of my stomach, feeling the small ripple of movement settle. "Not long."

I finished the shift the way I finished all of them lately — slow, careful, counting the hours by how many times I had to sit. Donna watched me from behind the register with an expression I'd learned to read over the months. Not pity. She didn't do pity, thank god. Just a kind of steady watching, the way you'd watch weather you weren't sure about yet.

"You should be off your feet more," she said when I came to cash out my tips.

"I need the hours."

"You need to not collapse in my diner." She said it flat, but she was already reaching under the counter, and she came up with an envelope, pressed it into my hand before I could argue. "That's not charity. That's an advance. You'll work it off once she's born and you're back on your feet."

I didn't open it there. I already knew it would be more than I'd earned that week, and I already knew arguing wouldn't move her.

"Thank you," I said instead, because that was the only thing that fit.

"Go home. Rest." She waved me toward the door. "I mean it, Sera."

The walk to my room above the bakery took twelve minutes on a good day. That evening it took closer to twenty, my body slower than it used to be, my back aching in a low, steady way that had become just another texture of being alive. The streets of Millhaven were nothing like the pack lands — no tree line pressing close on either side, no sense of eyes in the dark that weren't quite human. Just streetlights and a hardware store with its window display still decorated from a holiday two months past, and the smell of bread from the bakery downstairs drifting up through the floorboards of my room like it belonged to me too.

I let myself in, locked the door out of habit rather than fear, and sat on the edge of the bed to take my shoes off. My feet had swollen past the point where that was easy anymore.

The room wasn't much. A bed, a dresser I'd found at a secondhand shop and fixed the drawer on myself, a small crib in the corner still missing one side rail because I hadn't been able to afford the part yet. I looked at it every night like it was daring me to finish it in time.