I nod quietly, shame threading through the pride. My own baby, born and gone within a week. “That’s right. But way before then, there was him. Two pounds, seven ounces, the poor mite.”
Willow surprises me by asking, “What was his name?”
I look up, and I realize how grateful I am for the question. He’s more than a story. He was real. “Aiden,” I tell her. My voice catches. “Thanks for asking.”
“Of course,” she says quietly into the dark room. Her hand settles over her belly, protective, almost reverent. “Thanks for telling me.”
For the first time in a long time, sitting there in the half dark, I feel like maybe someone actually sees me.
18
WILLOW
On bed rest,days stretch thin. The ceiling is a field I’ve memorized. The clock is a cheap metronome. I move from couch to chair and back again, from plain crackers to ginger tea to vanilla yogurt, and tell myself variety is the spice of life. My phone buzzes with check-ins. Cheyenne. Dylan. Dr. Patel’s nurse. And, like clockwork, the men.
Sean arrives first, letting himself in and filling the doorway of my bedroom with a grin, a grocery bag looped over each arm. “Emergency provisions,” he announces. “Also, I brought a plant. Do you like that kind of thing?”
“What kind of plant?” I ask suspiciously from the couch.
“Green,” he says seriously, and reveals the saddest plant you’ve ever seen. It’s wiry and brave and starving in a tiny pot, its leaves turned toward the ground.
“It’s perfect,” I say, and he brightens like I mean it (I do) and sets it by the window, finagling the blinds to lay the light just right on the struggling leaves.
He starts stage-managing my living room within minutes—water within reach, pillow under knees, another behind my back, a blanket he pretends is a cape. He makes bad jokes on purpose so I’ll groan and then laugh. It works. It always works.
He folds and refolds the tiny clothes Cheyenne washed because he says the onesies have to be “department-store neat or the babies will judge, sure.” He hands me a little hat, smaller than my palm, with bear ears. “Tell me that’s not a felony, God love it,” he says softly. The joke is there, but the softness is louder.
I look at the hat and my throat tightens. “It’s evidence, all right.” He sets it to the side, clearing his throat, his face looking pinched.
Declan’s knock is a courtesy, as he’s already trailing in, hands gripping the handles of paint cans and loose papers shoved under his arms. His eyes flick over the house automatically, nodding at Sean folding onesies on my bed, the arms touching my legs like I’m furniture. I want to be annoyed by Declan and his ritual, his anxieties, except that I find it…soothing.
He looks into the nursery and stands there a long beat, forearm against the doorjamb like he’s holding the world at bay.
“It’s not finished,” I say from the bed, unnecessarily.
He turns his head, profile sharp, red hair bouncing. I have an urge to run my hand through it. I gesture for him to come closer to me, and he sets down the cans before he acquiesces. “It’s getting there, sure,” he says warmly, eyes on the clothes that Sean is folding.
I push the blanket off my legs and move to sit up, but Declan and Sean both surge forward like a wave in the ocean. Declan’s handfinds my chest, and Sean’s are on my shoulders. The blanket is over my body before I’m even sure what’s happened.
“I can take care of myself,” I tell them, my eyes on Declan, and he gives me a mild look back.
“You can,” he says. “And I can help. Both things can be true.”
I lean my head back against the pillow and study him. “That your love language? Assistance?”
He goes still for a fraction, something unreadable moving through his eyes like heat-shimmer over asphalt. Then: “It’s one of them.”
Sighing, I relent, asking, “What’s under your arm?”
“Ah, this.” He chuckles, pulling the pieces of paper out from under his arm. “These are some sketches Rowan did—ideas for the nursery mural.”
“Nursery mural?”
“Oh, you have to have a mural,” he tells me like it’s obvious. He moves through the space like a man in a house he knows intimately and respects. He doesn’t hover and somehow still hovers. He adjusts the angle of the fan. He pulls the throw rug back into alignment so I won’t trip when I get up to pee for the thousandth time.
“Of course the baby needs a mural. All babies need murals,” Sean agrees with a wink.
Cheyenne appears in the doorway with Rowan, holding a section of his button-up with two fingers like he’s infected. “I found this one outside looking lost. I asked him if he’d like to come in, and he seemed agreeable.”
