The heat in the temporary apartment was entirely independent of the weather outside. The old radiator pipes groaned with ambient, trapped warmth, yet Elena remained wrapped in the heavy, charcoal-wool sweater she had taken to wearing like a suit of armor.
She was approaching the end of her eleventh week, hovering on the exact threshold of the twelfth. Her body felt like a volatile equation where the variables changed by the hour. The morning sickness had ceased to be an early-day phenomenon; it was now a persistent, metallic taste in the back of her throat that peaked whenever the afternoon sun hit the brickwork of the courtyard below.
Elena sat on the edge of the living room sofa, a stack of heavily annotated biochemistry textbooks balanced on her knees. Her upcoming university examinat
