“But it seems like it’s all going one way. All you, giving to me and to mine.” Her tears, which had slowed, flowed harder again and dripped onto her flannel top. Her voice had gone tight, with tears clogging her sinuses and larynx. “Letting us stay here. For free. Every time we come. Bringing danger to you. Making things harder on you.”
I handed her a tissue from the box on the bedside table; she set down her mug and dabbed at her eyes. “Sometimes,” I said, “with family, the attention all goes one way for a while. Then sometimes it reverses and goes back the other way.” I shrugged and placed my empty mug on the tray. “Life is like that.”
“I didn’t tell you about the baby.”
And Molly had hit upon the one thing that had wounded me. She hadn’t told me about the baby. I dropped my eyes. “No,” I said evenly. Just because I thought of Molly as family didn’t mean that she felt the same way. And even if she did think me of family, some things were private. Or time sensitive. “You didn’t.”
She looked miserable but inhaled and blew out the breath, seeking an emotional equilibrium she clearly didn’t feel. “Okay. I want to explain. There were two reasons. One, we wanted to keep it secret until we know if it’s a witch.”
If the baby was a girl she would definitely be a witch, because she would get Evan’s X-linked witch genetics. If it was a boy, there was a fifty percent chance he would be witchy because he would get all his X genes from Molly, and she had only one witchy X-linked gene. Or gene packets. Whatever.
“Two,” Molly went on, “we didn’t want Angie to know for a while. We were going for eighteen weeks. Just to be sure that . . . well. That everything was okay.”
And then it hit me. She was worried about losing the baby. Witches lost more babies to miscarriage than humans and way more witch children to childhood cancers than humans. It was something that I had never had to think to about. “Oh,” I said, feeling flummoxed. And stupid.
Molly looked at her hands, holding her mug. “It didn’t seem fair to tell you until we were more certain about everything.” Tears slid down her face, not the drenching waterworks that Angie could turn on, but a lot of tears. I passed her the whole box of tissues. Molly sobbed, a single heart-wrenching note, sounding a lot like Angie.
I said, “So . . . we’re okay?”
Molly nodded and her throat made a horrible wet tearing/sobbing sound.
“The real problem?” I said. “Was that awful perfume.”
Molly blubbered out a laugh in the middle of her tears and inched closer on the bed. Using my foot, I pushed the tray out of the way and Molly moved to my side, putting her head on my shoulder.
Littermate, Beast thought, sending me a vision of a pile of cat bodies curled up together against the cold. Should have littermates. Like this. In den. Warmth, cat warmth, spread through me, and I had to blink away my own tears. I restrained the purr that started to build in my chest and tilted my head to rest it against Mol’s. Kitsssss, Beast thought, the scent of unborn baby and pregnancy filling my/our nose.
“So,” I said. “How far along are you?”
“Almost eighteen weeks.” She bumped my head with hers. “I’ve been eating like a horse and gained a lot more weight than with the others by this time.” She patted the baby bump and molded her hands around the mound. “We get the ultrasound next week.” I felt her lips turn up against my shoulder. Hesitantly she asked, “Want to fly or drive up for the ultrasound?”
Deep inside, Beast stopped purring, her ear tabs high and her gaze piercing. Molly can see kits inside of Molly? Magic?
No, I thought back. White man medicine.
Beast hissed with displeasure, her thoughts on seeing kits inside of Molly containing blood and guts and dead kittens on the dirt. It’s not like that, I thought at her. But the vision persisted.
“Jane?” Molly asked, her voice hesitant. “Do you?”
A smile pulled at my own mouth, wanting but uncertain. “You mean me? In the ultrasound room? With you?” My happiness slid away. “What would Big Evan say to that?”
“It was his idea. He said that he wanted his baby’s godmother to be there.”
“Oh . . .” My lips stayed parted, and I blinked at the tears that had gathered all unknowing, in my eyes, but they came too fast. One rolled down my cheek. I sniffed and wiped the back of my wrist across my face.
Molly jerked away, twisted on the mattress, and extended her neck like a turtle, her eyes searching mine. “I made you cry,” she said, incredulous. She passed me one of my own tissues.
“Yeah.” I chuckled unsteadily and patted my face with the tissue. “Crying’s contagious, but this is ridiculous. All these teary-eyed females in my testosterone-rich house. The boys are seriously outnumbered.”