She wrinkles her nose when Tewksbury passes over her cup of tea with two sugars, unstirred, and she knows.
She puts down the cup too quickly, blood pounding in her ears, and Tewksbury frowns, reaching for her hand. "Enola?"
"Got to go," she says, pushing herself to standing, almost just leaves him sitting there, hand outstretched, but he's her husband and she loves him, so she darts over to smack a kiss on his lips before she's running for the door.
"Enola!" he calls out again, but now he sounds less worried and more exasperated, which is better, which is good. There's nothing for him to worry about.
She wants her mother, who's banned from London and is causing political unrest in Southern France currently, or Edith, who's doing something clever and illegal in Scotland. She'd take Victoria, but Mycroft will be there, and he's the last person she wants to see right now. Sherlock, while beloved, is useless, but his boy is a doctor.
She drops in at 221B Baker Street, picking the lock like always, and is relieved that Sherlock is still asleep and decides not to have any opinions on the various bones scattered about the kitchen table. She assumes there's a reasonable explanation for them.
"Oh, Enola!" John grins and shoves some femurs to the side to make space at the table. "Here, join me, would you like some oatmeal? Are you looking for your brother? I can wake him-"
"I'm pregnant," she blurts out, then bites her bottom lip.
John blinks once, then twice, then says with a gentleness that had made her like him in the first place - because Sherlock wanted to be gentle, but was quite bad at it, so someone had to teach him - "This is what you wanted, isn't it?"
Wanted seems like not the correct word, although of course it is, because she and Tewksbury had been, not trying, but not-not trying, which probably amounted to the same thing, considering how often they - well.
"I can fix it," he says, voice low and serious, "if it's something that needs to be fixed."
Enola lets out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. "No. No, it doesn't need to be fixed."
She loves that he offered. She loves John, more her brother than Mycroft will ever be, sometimes even more her brother than Sherlock is. If nothing else, her brothers had picked their partners well. Victoria and John are a delight.
John is the functional one between them, explosions and skeletons notwithstanding. John is the one that coaxed her brother into a proper relationship and John is the one that knew they were like parents to all the Irregulars and John isn't normal but he grew up normal.
"Are you worried something's wrong?" he asks. "I can look you over."
"No," she says, although, "I mean, yes, that'd be nice because Tewksbury will go spare, but no, I'm not worried anything's wrong."
He leans back in his chair, looking her over, and after almost ten years of dealing with her and Sherlock and even occasionally Mycroft he can read them almost as well as they can read everyone else.
"It's alright to be scared," he says finally. "Lots of women are when they find out, even when it's wanted, even when the baby's healthy."
"I'm not scared," she says, but for the first time her words feel like a lie. "I shouldn't be scared. What do I have to be scared of?"
She wishes her mother was here.
Will her children miss her like this too?
Sometimes she misses her mother even when she's right in front of her, and if nothing else, she's her mother's daughter.
John gets to his feet, stand in front of her, and opens his arms. She looks away even as she steps forward, like if she doesn't look at him when she does it then it doesn't count as weakness.
His arms close around her. He smells like chai and antiseptic and it's only years of association that make the combination comforting. "I can't wait to be an uncle."
He'll be an uncle. Sherlock will be an uncle. Even Mycroft, and Victoria will be delighted to be an aunt, and to raise her children with Enola's. Of course there's her mother-in-law, and Tewksbury's uncle, who have been angling for her to have a child from the day they married.
There's Tewksbury, who loves her, who isn't going to die on her or leave her if either of them have anything to say about it, who isn't going to leave her to raise their children the way her mother raised her.
She's been saying she wasn't going to do this alone from the beginning, but standing here in Sherlock's kitchen, with John holding her steady, she really believes it.
