Semua Bab OFF LIMITS: Bab 41 - Bab 50

CHAPTER FORTY ONE POV: Damon Isla Sandra Reid was 3 years old and had opinions about everything. Not opinions in the way children had opinions, not tantrum opinions or tired opinions or hungry opinions, though she had those too. Real opinions. Considered ones. Delivered with the specific jaw set expression that Leila had identified on day one in the NICU and that had only gotten more pronounced as she’d grown into herself. She had opinions about which mug her orange juice went in. The blue one. Always the blue one. Any deviation from the blue mug was noted and addressed directly. She had opinions about the order of Sunday dinner. Salad first. Always salad first. Marcus had attempted to bring out bread first eight months ago and had been corrected with a patience that was somehow more devastating than a tantrum would have been. She had opinions about her name. Specifically, she had recently decided that Isla Sandra was too long for regular use and had announced to the table one

CHAPTER FORTY THREE POV: Zara May arrived the way May always arrived in London. Suddenly. Like the city had been grey and then someone made a decision and everything went green overnight. The trees on the street outside Marcus’s house doing the thing they did every year that she’d been watching from this window for three years and still found worth stopping for.38 weeks. She was enormous and entirely done with being pregnant and also terrified of not being pregnant anymore because the last time had been twenty seven weeks in a hospital and this time was going to be different. Ruth had told her so. Daniel had found her the same midwife on purpose because Zara had asked and Damon had made it happen. “Different,” Ruth had said at the last appointment. “Full term. Everything exactly as it should be.” “How do you know,” Zara had said. “Because I do this a lot,” Ruth had said. “And this one is ready.” She believed her. Mostly. She was 38 weeks and the size of something significan

CHAPTER FORTY FIVE POV: Isla She’d been preparing for 6 weeks. Not nervously. She didn’t do nervous the way most people did nervous, she did it quietly, internally, as a kind of sustained low level hum that nobody could see and that she managed by working. By going over the proposal again. By walking the building again. By sitting in the Grassmarket café with a coffee and looking at the stone frontage and reminding herself why. Clara. That was always why. Clara who had documented everything carefully and given it to a 16 year old in a box because she understood that the box might be all she had to give. Clara who had raised someone in the shadow of something terrible and had done it so well that the someone had walked into a courtroom at twenty four and given the room everything it needed. Clara. The building was going to be Clara’s. That was enough. That was more than enough. The planning committee met on a Thursday. Edinburgh City Chambers. The kind of room that had been

CHAPTER FORTY SEVEN POV: Marcus He’d known before anyone told him. That was the thing about paying attention. You noticed things. He’d been noticing things his whole life, it was his primary mode of existing in the world. He noticed when people were hungry before they said so. He noticed when a room needed something. He noticed when two people were doing the specific dance of not saying a thing that was already true. He’d noticed Leila and Isla for months. He hadn’t said anything. That was a new skill. The not-saying-anything skill. He’d been developing it since approximately the birth of Sandy who had taught him, at three years old, that sometimes the most useful thing you could do was hold space without filling it. He’d held space. He’d waited. He’d painted the room yellow and come to Edinburgh on a Thursday and noted that Glasgow wasn’t far. He’d waited some more. He’d received Zara’s text on Sunday morning — Leila and Isla. It happened. Don’t make it a thing. — and had

CHAPTER FORTY NINE POV: Isla March came in cold. Edinburgh in March was always cold — not the biting cold of January or the wet cold of November but the specific cold of a city that was almost ready to stop being winter and wasn’t quite there yet. The kind of cold that said soon without committing to when. She’d been in the building every day for three weeks. Not because there was still work to do. The work was done. The contractor had finished in January. The furniture had arrived in February. The staff — three of them, all women, all specific, all exactly right — had started in the first week of March. She’d been coming because it was hers. Not hers in the possessive sense. In the other sense. In the sense of something you’ve been moving toward for long enough that when it arrives it feels like a part of you that was always going to exist. Clara’s building. She stood on the pavement outside it every morning before she went in. Looked at the frontage. At the stone. At the