Page 67 of Omega’s Fold

The waistband of my jeans is too tight.

I put my hand flat against the side of my belly, low, where the band of the jeans is digging in. The skin is warm under my palm. I am four months along, near as I can work out. I am told you do not show much for the first one until five months or so.

It’s not going to be much longer until I’m showing.

I think, sitting on the trough, of Matthew’s old baby things. I think there is still a box of Matthew’s old baby things in the attic above the front hall. My mother kept everything. The crib is in the box. The little soft sleepers are in the box. The cotton hats. The blanket she made him before he was born, the one she taught herself sewing for.

Caleb’s things were in the same box for a while, and went to charity when Matthew outgrew them, but Matthew’s things stayed because by then she was sick and the box did not get sorted and after she died I did not have it in me to sort it.

I close my eyes and sit with my hand on my belly.

And the baby moves.

It is a small flutter, nothing more, like a butterfly has become trapped under my skin.

This baby is going to be the first Briggs in five generations to not grow up on this land. I wish there was something I could do about that but I can’t.

18. Julian

The light on the balcony has gone red. It does that in November, when the sun drops behind the building opposite and the last fifteen minutes of the day come through the gap between the buildings. The light hits the pots on the rail, including the small hard-leaved thing my mother gave me three years ago that I have managed, against the odds, not to kill.

The ivy has gone russet at the tips. The hard-leaved plant has not changed color, but the light makes it look as though it has.

I stand at the open balcony door with a beer in my hand and I look at the plants.

I had liked the balcony. I’ve spent many Sunday mornings out there with coffee and the paper. I had told myself that it was enough, the small piece of green at the edge of the apartment, the four pots and the trailing thing on the screen.

I do not think it now.

The balcony is six feet by four. There are no birds. Instead, there is the constant low hum of the cross-town traffic. It smells of pollution, when in two weeks I had become accustomed to fresh air.

The buzzer goes.

Eli.

I go inside and press the door release without checking the camera. I leave the balcony door open. I cross the kitchen, open the fridge and take out a second beer for him, cracking the cap on the underside of the counter.

The elevator dings down the corridor. Eli lets himself in without knocking. He has had his own key to this place for years.

“Hello, brother,” he says, kicking his shoes off in the hall, then takes the beer off the island without asking. He clinks the neck of his against the neck of mine.

He leans on the island opposite me, with his elbows on the counter and his beer in both hands.

I take a drink.

“So, what’s up?” he says. “You called me. I came. Talk.”

I take another drink.

I had called him at half past four from the desk in the small spare room I use as a study. I’d had the laptop open in front of me and the EIA appendix on the screen and the published summary up beside it on a second window.

“You remember Parish Ridge,” I say.

“Hard to forget.”

“I’ve been reading the environmental reports.”

“Okay?”