“All right, well- I can't, no, that isn't how it works. It's going to be fine, though, women do this all of the time and it's fine.” Frightening maternal death statistics are not something she feels the need to share with him, in this moment, when she's trying to reassure him that sort-of-hatching is not going to be a problem. Practically a breeze, surely. “What sort of happens, is-”

How she reached the point in her life where she's trying to teach a mermaid about where babies come from, she isn't sure, but she discovers she has a new respect for her father's method of waiting until she probably already knew about sex and pregnancy and then giving her pointers and making sure she had access to birth control. ('Try not to laugh at his cock, I know they're odd looking but we're very delicate, men are, you might hurt his feelings terribly' had been some of the advice Emery chose to bestow on her.)

“What happens,” she tries again, “is that that part of me's going to- stretch. Enough to let me push the baby out through it. Which is going to hurt a lot, but then I'll be all right, I'll just have to recover afterwards. Or if anything does go wrong, they can cut the baby out instead, but it isn't preferable.”

There are so many things that can go wrong, but she doesn't want to seem scared; not in front of him.