His fist curled around my finger while he drank. The grip was surprisingly strong for someone who couldn’t hold his own head up yet. He had Andrea’s nose, her grandmother confirmed it the day he was born, and my hair, dark and already curling at three weeks. His eyes were still the murky blue that all newborns had but Andrea swore they were going to be green like hers. I hoped she was right.
I stared at that tiny hand wrapped around my index finger and thought about my father. Wondered if Paul would have been a good grandfather. He wasn’t a good father. Too busy, too absent, a King first and a parent when the schedule allowed. Would he have slowed down for a grandchild? Maybe. Maybe not. I’d never know, and sitting in the dark with my son at three am, I realized that was okay. I didn’t need my father’s example for this. I just needed to be the opposite of it.
I was going to be at dinner. I was going to be in the nursery at three am. I was going to build things with my hands, get paint on my clothes, let Andrea photograph every screw-up. My son was going to know his father’s face from across the breakfast table, not from a portrait in the council chamber.
Andrea found me one morning. Four am, kitchen, Alex asleep on my chest in the rocking chair her grandmother sent from Whitebrook. She leaned against the doorframe in my shirt with her hair everywhere, looking half awake and fully unimpressed.
“You’re doing the staring thing again.”
“I’m not staring. I’m monitoring.”
“You’ve been monitoring him for three hours. He’s asleep.”
“He could wake up.”
“He’s three weeks old. All he does is sleep, eat, and shit. You don’t need to supervise all three.”
“What if he needs something?”
“He needs his father to sleep so he doesn’t drop him tomorrow.”
“I’m not going to drop him.”
“You dropped the bottle earlier.”
“The bottle was slippery.”
“The bottle was dry.”
She came over, leaned down, kissed Alex’s head, then kissed my mouth. Her hair fell forward and tickled Alex’s face and he scrunched his nose in his sleep. We both froze.
“Did you see that?” Andrea whispered.
“The nose scrunch.”
“We made that. We made a whole person who scrunches his nose.”
“We did.”
She sat on the arm of the rocking chair, leaned her head against mine. We watched our son sleep, scrunch, breathe. I thought: this is what I almost threw away for a fake illness and a woman I didn’t love. This kitchen, this chair, this baby. I would spend the rest of my life making sure I earned it.
A few days later I came home and heard her laughing in the living room. She was on a video call with her therapy group from Whitebrook, holding Alex up to the camera so they could see him.
I stopped in the hallway. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop. But the sound of Andrea laughing was something I’d walk through fire to hear.
“He’s perfect,” she was saying. “Ten fingers, ten toes, his dad’s hair, and he screams like he’s being personally victimized every time we change his diaper.”
A voice I didn’t recognize, loud, probably Hallie: “And Finneas? Is he still doing the obsessive staring thing?”
“He’s been up every night at three am for three weeks straight. He feeds the baby, holds the baby, stares at the baby. I found him asleep in the rocking chair yesterday with Alex on his chest and drool on both of them.”
Laughter from the phone. Then a quieter voice, maybe Adela: “And you two? You’re good?”
Andrea was quiet for a second. “Yeah. We’re really good. Like, stupidly good. Better than I thought I’d ever get.”
“You deserve it, Andrea.”
“I know.” I could hear her smiling. “I really do.”
