Page 26 of Protected By the BRATVA Grump

"Bill will take credit."

"Bill will absolutely take credit." She pulls back and wipes her face with her sleeve as she looks at me with her eyes swimming and her hair everywhere. "You have to feed me now. I have ran miles."

"You've ran one and a half miles."

We walk back to her apartment with her hand in mine and her thumb moving over the ring every few steps as though she's checking it's still there.

Epilogue

Delilah

The apple cake comes out of the oven exactly on time, which should have been my first warning that today was going to be different.

It's the ninth of January and the fog has been sitting over town since Christmas, thick enough this morning that I can't see the bridge from the kitchen window, only the smudge of the streetlight outside Kimmie's gallery holding on past nine. The heating pipe behind the pastry case is doing the thing where it knocks four times and stops. I've got the ovens going and the coffee machine on and the front of the café is warm enough to steam the inside of the windows, which is exactly how the regulars like it and exactly why none of them ever go home.

I set the cake on the rack and look at it for a while. Golden all the way to the edges. Not one dark spot in sight.

"That's not right," Bill says from his table, without lowering his paper.

"It's perfect."

"That's what I said."

I'm thirty nine weeks and four days, and I am enormous. I stopped being able to see my own feet in November. My apron gave up around the same time and now ties above the bumplike a very small flag on a very large hill. Sammie has instructed me to stop working four separate times. Purr and Pour opens at seven, and it has opened at seven every day for five years, and I would rather be here than at home wondering what everybody else is doing.

Lucifer has been following me since I unlocked the door. Not sitting in his usual place on the cash registered, not conducting his inspection, just walking three feet behind me from the counter to the kitchen and back again with the grim persistence of a man serving a warrant. When I stop, he stops. Duchess has abandoned the high shelf entirely and is lying across the top of the pastry case where she is absolutely not allowed, watching me with both eyes.

"Your cats are being weird," Bill says.

"They're always weird."

"Not like this they're not." He scrunches up his face as he watches Lemur walk circles around my feet.

Sammie comes in at twenty past nine with Lilah on her hip. Lilah goes down onto the floor the second she's released and heads for the cats at the speed of a girl with somewhere to be.

"You're still standing," Sammie says.

"I'm working."

"You're leaning." She ties her apron and gives me a long, unimpressed look. "How long has she been leaning on the counter like that, Bill?"

"Fifteen minutes."

I’m starting to dislike Bill.

"My back hurts. But my back has hurt since October, so it’s not a pregnancy thing."

Kimmie comes over from the gallery ten minutes later, the way she does most mornings now, shaking out her hair and putting a folder of framing quotes down on the end of the counter.

"How are you feeling?" she asks.

"Everybody keeps asking me that," I mumble, slicing a piece of cake for her.

She nods slowly. "That's because you look like you're about to give birth in a coffee shop."

I ignore her and do what I always do, steam milk and pull shots and call out names, except that at some point I notice I've stopped between orders, both palms flat on the counter, waiting out something that tightens low across the front of me and then goes away again. It happens while Mrs. Aldridge is telling me about her sister. It happens again while I'm boxing a dozen buns. It happens a third time and I look at the clock over the door. Then I put the box down and go and check the tray of scones I’ve got in the oven.

I know what it is. I've known what it is since about half past eight.