Cecily was present for most of these visits, in the chair by the fire with a book she was not reading, and over the course of several evenings, they had developed a kind of domestic shorthand—the exchange of information about the day’s progress, the physician’s latest instructions, and whether the feedings had gone well. Practical. Comfortable in the way of two people who had been through something together and were still in the aftermath of it.
It was the most honest they had ever been with each other without either of them having said anything particularly honest. Something about the nursery at that hour made performance unnecessary.
She was not sure what to do with that.
On the fourth evening, William had come in at the usual hour, spoken to Doris, and looked at the baby. Cecily was in her chair. The fire was good. Outside the window, the November dark had come down early, pressing against the glass and making the room feel more enclosed than it was.
Letitia was sitting cross-legged on the floor, conducting a one-sided conversation with the cloth rabbit, apparently on the baby’s behalf. Isadora was seated at the small writing desk withthe physician’s notes, a quill in hand, which meant she was writing questions.
William leaned over the crib. The baby was awake, tracking whatever came within her limited sight. She found his face and went still with the absolute focus of someone encountering something interesting.
“She’s looking at you,” Letitia said from the floor.
“She looks at the lamp as well,” William said.
“The lamp doesn’t look back.”
He reached into the crib and offered his finger. It was a thing Cecily had seen him do before, almost absentmindedly, giving the baby something to hold in the way one gave a restless person something to do with their hands. The baby’s fist closed around it with the immediate, unthinking grip of an infant who had decided this was hers now.
William went still. He did not pull away. He stood at the side of the crib with his finger enclosed in a fist the size of a walnut, looking down at the baby with an expression that Cecily had never seen on him in any other context. It was not composure, or deliberate ease, or watchfulness, but something quieter than all of those. Something that had nothing behind it.
His thumb moved slowly across the baby’s knuckles. Once. Twice. And Cecily felt her chest constrict so hard she had to rub it.
She looked down at her book for approximately four seconds, took a calming breath, and then looked back at him, because she was apparently incapable of not looking at him, which was information she was still processing.
The baby had not let go. She showed no signs of letting go. She was looking up at him with serious, unblinking eyes, and he was looking back at her, and the room was very quiet.
Letitia, with uncharacteristic sensitivity, had stopped talking to the rabbit. Isadora had also stopped writing.
Cecily said nothing. She watched William’s face in the firelight and thought about a boy of nineteen with two little sisters and a house full of noise and grief, who had learned to carry children through the night because someone had to, and who was standing now at the side of a crib with his finger trapped in a small fist, and who looked—for just this moment, in this room, as if no one was watching him—entirely undone by it.
He grew aware of her watching.
His eyes moved to hers. She didn’t look away in time.
“Her grip is improving.” His voice was level. The composure had returned, or most of it. It was the practiced kind, the kind thatarrived quickly because it had been deployed many times before. “Doris mentioned it this morning. It’s a good sign.”
“Perhaps she knows she’s safe,” Cecily said, the corner of her mouth quirking.
He looked at her.
She had not planned to say it. It had come out of somewhere deep, and now it was in the room.
He was looking at her, and the air between them had the quality it sometimes had—compressed, charged, a room with less space in it than its dimensions suggested. His thumb was still stroking the baby’s knuckles.
“Perhaps,” he said.
He did not look away. Neither did she.
“William,” Isadora piped up from the writing desk, in the tone of someone who had been waiting for a gap and had decided to make one. “The physician said to watch for fever in the second week. Does that mean we should still be checking her temperature in the night, or only if she seems restless?”
William looked at his sister. The room had resumed its normal dimensions.
He straightened carefully, and the baby’s grip loosened as he withdrew his finger by degrees—not pulling, just gradually freeing himself, which took longer than it should have because she tightened her grip once before she let go. He waited for her with the unhurried attention of a man who had decided not to rush it.
Cecily watched his face while he did this.
She should not have. She knew she should not have. But she watched him look at the baby as he freed his hand, the slight pause before he stepped back, the look of someone setting something down carefully.
