So I do.
I tell him about breakfast outside with his mother. The tamarind snacks. The tea. The toast. The grapes. Later, the hallway, the jar, the handful I took after. Water in my room. Nothing else I can think of.
He listens without interrupting, his face getting colder with each item. Not at me. At the list itself. At the places in it where something could have gone wrong.
When I’m done, he asks me to repeat the order. Then who handed me what. Then whether anyone else touched the tray.
“You think it was in the food,” I say.
“I think someone found a way.”
That is not reassuring. Then again, nothing in this situation is.
He squeezes my hand once, a gesture so absentmindedly gentle it almost hurts more than the questions. “Rest.”
“You’re leaving.”
“For an hour.”
“That sounds suspiciously specific.”
“I have people to speak to.”
Of course he does.
I want to ask him to stay anyway. I don’t. He’s already giving me a look that says he knows exactly what I’m not saying.
“When can I see the baby?” I ask instead.
Something shifts in his face. Softer. Still careful. “As soon as the doctor clears it.”
That is not an answer with a clock attached. I can tell because he knows it and I know it and neither of us says so.
I nod anyway.
He leans down, kisses my forehead, and says, “Sleep.” Then he leaves before I can make anything harder.
The room is quiet after that. Too quiet.
I lie there staring at the ceiling, one hand over the place where the baby had been and isn’t anymore, and try to picture him somewhere else in this building. Small. Breathing. Alive.
A son.Ours.
The word still does not feel fully real.
I think about what Aleksei looked like when he heard it. How still he went. How terrified. How certain.
I think about love confessed under fluorescent lights and surgical threat, and how absurd it is that the first truly honest thing between us had to happen with poison already in my blood.
Eventually the thoughts blur.
I fall asleep wondering how long it will be before I get to see my baby.
When I wake, the room is dimmer.
For one confused second, I think I hear the baby monitor from some impossible domestic future I do not have yet.
Then I realize someone is standing near the foot of my bed.
