Eira was fascinated. She stood by Mama's chair, her head tilted at an angle as she stared at the swell of her jumper.

"Baby?" Eira whispered, reaching out a tentative finger.

Mama smiled—a real, soft smile that reached her eyes—and took Eira's small hand, guiding it to rest against the curve of her stomach. "She's in there," Mama said softly. "She's sleeping right now, I think."

Eira's eyes went wide. She leaned in closer, pressing her ear against the fabric. "I hear her," she announced with the absolute confidence of a two-year-old. "She says... hello."

The table went quiet for a heartbeat. I caught Peter's eye, and I saw the shimmer of something there—a pride he tried to hide behind his gruff exterior. We were seventeen once, all of us, lost in the fog of these hills. Seeing them now, with Eira acting as the bridge between the present and the future, it felt like the world was righting itself.

After lunch, we decided to walk the canal path toward Risca. The water was a dark, glassy ribbon reflecting the overhanging trees, their leaves falling like gold coins into the current. Peter and Papa took the lead, Eira perched on Peter's shoulders, her hands gripped tightly in his hair as she shouted instructions at the ducks.

"Quack, quack!" she yelled, pointing at a pair of mallards.

I walked with Mama, our pace slower, more deliberate. She moved with a grace that surprised me—a quiet strength that seemed to settle into her more with every mile we covered. We talked about the college, and about the terrifying, beautiful reality of this.

"Does it ever get easier?" she asked, looking out at the water. "The feeling that you're just... playing a part? That one day someone's going to notice you don't know what you're doing?"

"Every single day," I said, and I meant it. "I'm twenty-seven, I've had Eira for nearly two years, and I still wait for the 'adults' to come and tell me I've got it wrong. But then she laughs, or she learns a new word, and you realize that nobody knows what they're doing. We're all just making it up as we go."

Suddenly, Peter stopped ahead of us, his hand raised in a silent "hush." He pointed toward a cluster of reeds near the rusted lock.

We all froze. There, barely ten feet away, a sleek, dark head broke the surface of the water. An otter. It moved with an effortless, liquid precision, its whiskers twitching as it climbed onto a half-submerged log. It paused for a second, its black-bead eyes catching ours, a wild, ancient presence in the heart of the valley.

Eira gasped, her voice a tiny puff of wonder. "Doggy?"

"An otter, love," Peter whispered, his voice full of a nerd's delight. "They don't come out often. You've got to be special to see one of those. Proper lucky, we are. That's a blessing, that is."