She considers the unshakable physicality of her baby, turning now, suspended above the bowl of her hips. Her doubt feels also like a tangible thing, twisting its way through the air and blooming around her like nightshade.

She cannot fall back asleep. Her eyes dry out and ache. In the morning, the doubt is still there. It has coiled around her nightstand and she can feel its scratchy leaves in the folds of her clothing.

“Don’t,” she says to Saul, as he snakes an arm around her belly. “Don’t do that.”

“Do you feel okay?” he asks.

“I’m fine.” Her voice is a locked door.

“How about tonight I bring home Chinese?” Saul suggests. “You shouldn’t have to cook.”

“I said I’m fine,” says Sofia, and walks to the bathroom.

After she closes the door, she stares at herself in the mirror. Her face is always bright lately, shiny with new blood and warm air. Her features look ordinary. Are you bad? she wonders. Are you broken?

—

In the kitchen, Saul has made a pot of tea. He has sliced bread for toast. He has set two eggs next to one another on the counter. “Boiled?” he asks Sofia as she comes out of the bathroom. Sofia wants to refuse herself food. She wants to feel the empty throb of her stomach until she figures out what is wrong with her. But hunger has taken on a new ferocity over the course of her pregnancy and Sofia finds herself unable to resist her primal needs: to pee, to sleep, to eat.

“Boiled,” she responds, and sits at the table. It is still strange for her to sit in a kitchen that belongs to her, that smells like the food she and Saul eat, that is not presided over by her own mamma. It is strange to run out of olive oil, soap, bleach. Strange to wake up next to Saul every day. It makes her giddy; it makes her nervous. It feels like she is a child, playing house with Antonia. She has whiplash from the speed at which her life morphed into this adult shape. As her body stretches against the confines of her child’s skin, Sofia wants, again and again, to be angry. Or else, she is joyous and bursting with energy, peppering kisses over the surface of Saul’s chest and shoulders, making him late for work.

But Saul is unrelentingly kind. He makes room for her anger. He stays grounded when Sofia threatens to explode.

There is nothing tangible for Sofia to fight against.

And so she finds herself thinking about her words, swallowing down snappy comebacks and dissatisfactions that jar like rocks against one another in her throat. She finds herself choosing a gentleness she has never known before, conserving her energy.

At night, she curls into Saul’s side like an animal making a nest.