She looks exhausted in the way only new mothers do—the kind of tired that goes past the body and settles into the bones.
Her golden hair is piled on top of her head in something that stopped being a bun about three hours ago, and there's a spit-up stain on the shoulder of Garrett's flannel that she's stolen and will never return.
But her eyes are clear. Bright. Alive in a way that still catches me off guard sometimes.
I spent years watching this woman disappear into her own veins, and now she's standing in front of me with breast milk on her shirt and a sleeping newborn in the next room.
It's a lot. Even now. Even after everything we've rebuilt.
"Hey." She steps back to let me in, keeping her voice low. "You look like shit."
"Thank you, Vanna. That'sexactlywhat every woman wants to hear after a twelve-hour shift."
"I say it with love." She looks at me closer, and the teasing drops out of her voice. "Bad night?"
"Three ODs this week. Saved all of them, but..." I trail off. I don't finish the sentence because I don't need to. Vanna knows what fentanyl does.
Vanna knows what almost dying looks like from the inside.
The fact that she's standing here, sober, a mother, with color in her cheeks and light in her eyes—that's not nothing. That's a miracle that somebody somewhere probably doesn't get enough credit for.
She pulls me into a hug.
She smells like baby lotion and the lavender detergent she's been using since she came home from rehab, and I hold on a beat longer than I mean to.
A small, strangled sound comes from the bassinet in the corner. Not a cry—more like a protest. A tiny human objection to the fact that the world exists and is too bright and too loud and not warm enough.
Vanna pulls back with the instinct of a woman who's been a mother for all of eight weeks. "That's his hungry sound. Give me a second."
She scoops Waylon out of the bassinet and settles into the chair by the window with him, adjusting her shirt to nurse.
He's so small.
That's the thing that gets me every time—how impossibly small he is.
Dark hair like Garrett's, though Vanna swears it's going to lighten up.
A scrunched, furious little face that relaxes the second he latches.
"He looks like Garrett," I say, sitting on the edge of the bed.
"He looks like a potato and you know it. A cute potato. But a potato."
I laugh. A real one—the first real one all day. "He's a beautiful potato, Vanna."
She grins down at him, and the look on her face—God. It's the look of a woman who fought through hell to get here.
Detox. Rehab. The assault. The cravings that still wake her up at night, though she doesn't talk about those as much anymore.
All of it, every single ugly chapter, led to this: a baby boy nursing in a quiet room while his mother smiles at him like he invented the sun.
"He's up every two hours," she says, stroking the dark fuzz on his head. "I haven't slept more than three hours straight since he was born. My nipples feel like they've been through a war. And I've never been this happy in my entire life." She looks up at me. "Is that insane?"
"Little bit." I smile. "But the good kind."
"Your brother cried when they put him on my chest. Full-on ugly crying. Don't let him tell you otherwise."
"Oh, I know. Garrett texted me a picture of Waylon thirty seconds after he was born and the text was mostly typos because his hands were shaking so bad."
