“Her mother’s name is Sienna, and she was brought in this morning, I’m not sure about anything else.”
The nurse nods, as if that’s enough information.
She scans us into the NICU, and the warm, humming quiet of the room hits me first. Then the machines. The small beds. The impossibly tiny bodies inside them.
She leads me to the far side.
My daughter is still there.
For one moment, the fear in me changes shape. It doesn’t leave. It only bends around the sight of her.
She’s sleeping under soft light, a cap low over her head, one little hand curled near her face. The nurse says something about her vitals being stable, but the words barely reach me.
I lean closer to the incubator.
She’s smaller than anything has a right to be while still feeling this enormous.
I look at her face properly this time. Not in a blur of emergency. Not while the room is full of doctors and blood and Sienna’s fear. I look, and it hurts. There’s Sienna in her mouth, in the shape of her cheeks, in the softness of her face.
But there’s me too. The line of the brow. The dark hair, what little there is of it. The stubborn set of her tiny mouth even in sleep.
My daughter.
The truth is so obvious now that I almost hate myself for ever needing proof.
How was I so blind?
I stand there with one hand on the glass, staring at the child I nearly learned about too late, and every delay, every misunderstanding, every ugly word from Ethan feels suddenly obscene.
“Why would the mother leave her baby here?” I say, turning to the nurse.
She gulps, her eyes widening. “I’m sorry, sir. There must have been some kind of misunderstanding. I’ll get the nurse from the previous shift. She was here earlier. Maybe she knows.”
“Do that.”
She leaves quickly.
I stay beside the incubator, but the tenderness of the moment is gone now, replaced by something colder. Sienna would not leave this hospital while our daughter was here. Not willingly. Not without fighting half the staff if she had to.
A few minutes later, another nurse arrives. She gives me a professional smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. “Mr. Sokolov?”
I step away from the incubator. “Where is she?”
“She was resting when I last checked on her.”
“That’s not an answer.”
The smile fades a little. “Post-surgery patients can become disoriented. It’s possible she tried to move around or became overwhelmed. We’re checking the ward.”
“You said she was resting.”
“I said when I last checked.”
“When was that?”
She hesitates.
There.
