Aoife
The almost moment happened in week thirty-four, on a Saturday evening, in the kitchen.
We were making a lamb stew that was my grandmother's recipe, which I had written from memory onto an index card. He had read it carefully and asked one question about the quantities and then produced the ingredients without further consultation. I was managing the herb end of things from my stool at the counter, and he was at the stove.
We were talking about Callum, who had apparently sent Jensen a photograph that morning of the Delmar account quarterly report with a sticky note that said "You're welcome" in large letters. Jensen was telling me this with the dry affection he used when talking about his brother, a warmth in his voice that he did not have to work at.
I laughed. Not the managed kind but the real kind, helpless and unplanned, the kind that catches you before you can arrange yourself around it, and he looked over at me from the stove.
Whatever was in his face in that moment was something I had not seen before. Open and undefended and entirely directed at me. Not fond exactly, or not only fond. Something more deliberate than that, as if he had looked up and seen something and decided, in that instant, not to look away from it.
The laugh finished. I looked at him. He was still looking at me.
The kitchen was very quiet. The stew was doing what stews do on low heat. I thought: if you move toward this, if you let yourself move toward this, you are going to be back in the same place you have always been with him, wanting more than he will give. You have two children coming and you cannot afford to do that again.
He turned back to the stove. He adjusted the heat. He said, without looking at me, "Your grandmother knew what she was doing with this recipe."
I said, "She always did."
We ate dinner. It was very good. Neither of us said anything about what had happened, because nothing technically had, and because we were both people who had learned that some things were safer in the place where words could not reach them.
But that night, in the guest room with the twins moving in the way they did in the evenings, I thought about his face at the stove. I thought: he looked at you like you were the only thing in the room.
Then I thought about Simone, years ago, in the break room at Mae's: He's looking at you like you're the only thing in the room and you are actively pretending not to notice.
I had said I was not pretending. I was still not pretending. I was simply being very, very careful.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX
Three in the Morning
Aoife
Iknew it was time at three in the morning on a Tuesday in late September, thirty-six weeks into the pregnancy. I woke into a sensation that was more organised and more purposeful than the usual nighttime discomforts, arriving in waves with a spacing that I timed on my phone for forty minutes before I could no longer tell myself it was something else.
I did not wake Jensen immediately. Old habit. I lay there for forty minutes timing contractions, and then the next one arrived with a specificity that ended the debate, and I got up and I knocked on his door.
He was awake in under three seconds. He opened the door and looked at me — his hair undone from sleep, his face alert and fully present in the way of someone who has gone from sleeping to completely awake in a single motion — and he did not ask whether I was sure. He just said, "How far apart?" I told him. He said, "Get your bag. I'll get the car."
He had packed a hospital bag two weeks ago without mentioning it. I had found it in the wardrobe the week before, fully stocked, including the specific brand of coconut water Dr. Mehta had recommended and a soft blanket from the guest room that I had not known he had noticed I used. I had stood in front of that bag for a moment, and I had thought about four hundred dollars on a table and a man packing a hospital bag insecret, and I had understood that these were the same man, and that somehow that had to be all right.
At the hospital, my blood pressure on admission was 169 over 108, and the room assembled around this information with a briskness that cut through the haze of the contractions. Dr. Mehta arrived at four fifteen. She looked at my chart and looked at me and said, "Given the gestational age and the preeclampsia status, we're going to proceed with delivery. Two NICU teams are standing by. This is the right call, Aoife." I said I understood. Her face was calm and certain in the way that made me trust her completely.
Jensen stood at the head of the bed. He had been there since the room assembled, holding my hand without being asked. At one point the monitor readout climbed to 175 over 115 and I saw the room shift, more voices, the monitoring intensified, and I closed my eyes.
Jensen leaned down. He said, very quietly, so that it was only for me: "They are going to be fine. You are going to be fine. I am right here."
I looked at him. He looked back. His face was calm and his eyes were not. I thought: I believe you. I do not know why I believe you, exactly, given everything that has happened between us, but I do.
I held his hand. I let them take me into theatre.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
4:47 AM
