Maybe not mine. Maybe not yet.
But ours, in some new frightening way.
The ride back is absurdly tense for people bringing home a sleeping newborn.
I keep leaning over every few minutes just to check if he’s breathing.
Aleksei keeps telling the driver to slow down at corners and then glaring at me when I try to adjust the baby blanket without unbuckling.
“We are both being insane,” I whisper.
“Yes,” he says, eyes still on the baby. “But I’m doing it correctly.”
I should be offended. Instead, I laugh.
It feels strange. Good strange. Thin with exhaustion, but real.
By the time we pull into the drive, the house staff is lined up with the kind of discreet excitement rich houses probably manufacture for occasions like this. Someone has put flowers in the foyer. Someone else has clearly aired out the nursery three more times than necessary. Aleksei’s mother is not there.
That absence sits in the house like a bruise.
No one says her name. No one needs to.
We go upstairs slowly. Everything is slow now. Every movement. Every decision. The baby wakes once and makes one small,offended sound, and both of us freeze like a bomb just ticked louder.
I take him from the car seat and he settles again against me, warm and impossibly trusting.
Aleksei watches us. That look on his face is going to ruin my life if I’m not careful.
It’s softer now. Not weaker. Just open in places that used to stay locked. He watches me like he still can’t believe we both made it here. Me, alive. The baby, alive. All of us under one roof without monitors and nurses and the constant fear that the next person through the door will bring worse news.
The first day home blurs into all the things no one tells you are ninety percent of having a newborn. Feeding. Burping. Changing. Feeding again. Staring in alarm at normal noises. Staring in alarm at silence. Arguing softly over whether he feels too warm or too cool. Napping in twenty-minute slices that feel like being hit over the head with mercy.
By evening, I am standing at the nursery window with the baby asleep on my shoulder, swaying in place because apparently that’s just what my body does now, when I hear footsteps behind me.
Aleksei. Of course.
He comes in quietly and stops beside me. “He’s asleep?” he whispers.
I glance down at our son, his tiny mouth parted, one fist curled under his chin. “For now.”
Aleksei leans in to look, and for a second the three of us are reflected in the nursery glass. It hits me then.
Not in some grand romantic swell. In a very practical, terrifying, intimate way.
This is a family.
Not neat. Not normal. Not stable in the way guidebooks would recommend.
But real.
I lower the baby into the bassinet as carefully as if the floor might shake, then turn and find Aleksei still watching me. “What?” I whisper.
He doesn’t answer right away. That should have warned me.
Instead, I just stand there in my milk-stained robe and borrowed slippers and wait.
Then he says, very quietly, “Marry me.”
