Elara arrived in eighteen minutes.
Fiona knew because she had been standing on the hospital pavement watching the minutes on her phone screen since the call ended, not reading anything, not moving much, just standing in the cold with her coat pulled around her and the bump pressing warm and insistent against the fabric and the particular quality of stillness that arrived when too many things had happened too quickly for any of them to be properly felt yet.
She saw her mother before Elara saw her. A cab pulling up at the far end of the drop-off zone, the door opening before it had fully stopped, Elara stepping out with the focused urgency of a woman who had not waited to find her good coat and was wearing the older one she kept by the door for emergencies. That detail, the emergency coat rather than the good one, landed somewhere in Fiona's chest with a warmth she had not expected to feel in this moment.
