Chapter 51 — "Tessa's Turn"

The first sign comes at dawn, in the birthing room.

They built it for Roxy back in season three — a big room off the main house with a wide bed dressed in clean sheets, a rocking chair in the corner, a kettle always warm on the side table, and a window that looks out over the east pasture where the sun comes up over the fence line like something opening its eyes. Tess has been sleeping in it for a week. Not because anyone told her to. Because the nursery is right there, two doors down, and because when she woke up at three in the morning with her belly so tight she couldn't roll over, the walk was short enough that she didn't have to wake the whole house.

She's standing at the window in her nightgown when it happens. A tightening. Low and deep, wrapping around her belly like a broad hand squeezing and then letting go.

It is not like Braxton Hicks. She knows Braxton Hicks. She's been living with Braxton Hicks for a month, and this is nothing like that.

This is a door swinging open.

"Tess." Vivian's voice from the doorway, soft and knowing, like she felt it through the floorboards. Vivian has been getting up at dawn every morning for nine months — Wren still nurses before the sun is up — and she stands there with her shawl over her nightgown and her green eyes already certain. "That face I know."

"It just —" Tess presses her palm to the underside of her belly. It happens again. A long, slow cinch, from the bottom up, her whole womb drawing tight as a fist. She breathes through it the way Vivian taught her, in through the nose, out through the mouth, and when it lets her go she laughs — a startled, breathless, disbelieving laugh. "Vivian. That wasn't practice."

Vivian crosses the room in three steps and puts both hands on Tess's belly, feeling it, reading it like a ledger page. Her eyes shine.

"Sit," she says. "I'll wake him."

· · ·

Damion is already awake.

He's standing at the big window of the master bedroom when Vivian comes in, still and dark against the grey-blue morning light, his shirt off, his hands braced on the windowsill. Elena is asleep in the four-poster behind him, curled around Darian in the bedside cradle, her hair a spill of dark silk across the pillow. He turns when he hears Vivian's bare feet, and he reads her face before she says a word.