Page 27 of Protected By the BRATVA Grump

I want another hour. That's the whole of my reasoning. One more hour of normal, one more hour of this exact place before everything about my life changes.

Ten past eleven, I'm reaching up for the good icing bag on the top shelf, which I could have asked Sammie to get, and something inside me gives with a distinct and unmistakable pop.

I stand very still in the middle of the kitchen.

"Sammie," I call out.

"Mm?"

"Sammie!"

The second one brings her through the doorway at a speed could be a run if I squint just right. She takes in the floor and my face and puts one hand flat on the frame.

"Okay," she says. "Okay. Right."

Out front, Bill's voice comes through with the enormous satisfaction of a man whose entire life has been leading to this moment. "Is it happening? I said this morning. I said it about the cake."

"You said nothing about the cake, Bill."

"I said it was unusual."

Kimmie appears with an armful of the good tea towels and a look of absolute terror. Mrs. Aldridge takes over the register without being asked and starts telling people the machine is broken. Somebody's toddler is removed from the vicinity of the mop bucket. Lucifer sits down directly in front of me and refuses to move, which means that everyone entering the kitchen has to step over a cat, and Duchess supervises the entire operation from the pastry case like a woman who saw all this coming and can't be held responsible.

Sammie has her phone against her ear. "Eduard. Yes. Now. No, actually now."

Another one comes and this one has teeth in it. I get both hands on the edge of the prep table and breathe through it while Sammie counts out loud beside me, and when it lets go I straighten up and reach for my phone with fingers that don't entirely belong to me.

"I need to call Jasper."

The bell over the front door goes.

I know the sound of him coming in. He comes through the kitchen doorway in his leather jacket, and doesn’t look surprised.

"How are you here?" I ask as another contraction takes hold.

He crosses the kitchen, steps over the cat without appearing to notice it, and puts his hand on the side of my face.

"Bag's in the car," he says. "St. Anne's know we're coming."

"Jasper. How are you here?"

Bill answers from the doorway before he can. "He's been out there every day for a fortnight," he says. "Truck across the road, by the postbox. I've been taking him coffee."

I scowl at my husband.

He looks back at me with absolutely no shame whatsoever.

"Thirty six weeks," he says. "It seemed sensible."

There's a laugh coming up out of me and it turns into something else on the way. I put my forehead down against his chest and get a fistful of his jacket and hold on. Three weeks after he put the ring on my finger I sat on the closed lid of my bathroom toilet and looked at two pink lines. Every single thing since then has been him arranging the world around me while telling me it's only sensible.

"I'm going to have this baby," I tell his jacket. When the pain subsides I add, "In the car, possibly."

"Not in the car." He tips my chin up. "I've timed it. I can get us there in eleven minutes."

He lifts me like I’m not an actual hippopotamus and carries me out through the front, because there's no dignified way to do this and I've decided not to try. The whole café stands up. Bill holds the door. Kimmie is crying and shouting ‘good luck.’ Sammie kisses the side of my head and tells me she'll close up early and meet me at the hospital. Lilah, held on somebody's hip in the middle of all of it, waves at me with her whole arm the way she waves at the trash truck.

The last thing I see through the window as we pull away in Jasper’s ridiculous van is Lucifer, back up on the till where he belongs, satisfied that the situation has been handed over to the appropriate authority.