The woman in the reflection of the full-length mirror hanging on the back of the hotel’s bathroom door had her hand on her bare stomach, fingers applying the smallest amount of pressure to expanse of soft skin right below her belly-button.
Reflections were just as projections in dreams, Mal thought. Others would argue with her - a reflection was just that, a reflection, an exact copy of the image you presented. You could not change the reflection without changing the original. Maybe, she thought, it was because she grew up as a girl in a society that demanded perfection. Women, you see, never really saw what was reflected in the mirror. They saw what they thought they were in terrible clarity: fat, not pretty enough, old, gawky, too tall, too short, small breasted, undesirable. What Mal saw when she looked in the mirror was a woman who couldn’t possibly be pregnant.
Telling Dom had brought some relief, his enthusiasm and the way his face lit up - like it did when he stood in front of one of his favorite buildings - successfully slowing the leak of doubts trickling down into her mind. Slowing but not stopping. Dom had always been the romantic, the one who believed anything was possible, nothing unrealistic. To him the world was there for them to create and this - was it even a child yet or some zygote? - was pure creation. He saw possibilities, Mal saw only restrictions. After all, they didn't live in a dream, they couldn't bend the world around them to fit their needs. And if they could? Children needed stability.
There was no question in her mind that she would spend the rest of her life with Dom, more than one lifetime if she had any say in the matter. And she had thought about having children, they even discussed it, but it was always in the future, farther down the road. Not here. Not now.
She managed to pull her stare from the woman in the mirror and hurried to finish dressing, throwing on a linen dress that would help with the heat of the Brazilian climate. Dom had left to work on the landscapes which gave her some time. She needed to talk things out and there was only one person she trusted enough to do so with. She dialed Arthur's number.