My brother watched this exchange with the expression of a man who is drunk on something that has no hangover.
I've been watching Rovin for my whole life. I know every configuration of his face. What I saw in that hospital roomtonight was something new, something that looked like the wordpermanentfinally finding a person to live inside. He's been building permanence his entire life, the way the rest of us breathe, and tonight he finally looked like he believed in it.
My phone vibrates. I look at the screen.
How was he?
Katriona.
Small,I send back.Loud opinions for someone with no words yet. You'd like him.
The three dots appear immediately, which is its own kind of tell.
How're Claudia, and Rovin?
I consider this. Rovin, who sat in a plastic chair beside Claudia's bed with his forearm across his knees and his eyes on a face he clearly couldn't stop looking at. Rovin, who said almost nothing for the entire hour because he didn't need to. Who looked up once, briefly, and met my eyes across the room with an expression that needed no translation.
Different,I send. Then, after a moment:Good different.
The dots again. Then:Come home.
I'm already counting the turns until I pull into the drive.
I find her in the kitchen.
She's wearing the grey cashmere robe I bought her last month, the one she claimed she didn't need and has worn every evening since. Her dark hair is down, spilling loose around her shoulders, and she's sitting at the island with a mug of something hot.
She looks at me when I walk in.
"Well," she says.
I set my keys down. I cross to where she's sitting and I stand in front of her, close, and she tips her head back to look at me properly and her expression goes through something complicated that she doesn't quite finish before she schools it.
"That bad?" she asks.
"No." I take the mug gently from her hands and set it aside, and then I take her face in both of mine, the way I do when I need her full attention, when the only geography that matters is the three inches between us. "Not bad. The opposite."
She reads me. She's been reading me for a year now. Her eyes move across my face and she finds whatever I'm not saying, the small catch in her breath tells me she's understood.
"Akyl."
"I held him," I say. "This child who has never met me, who has no basis for forming an opinion about anything… I held him, and he opened his eyes and looked at me, and I felt…"
"What did you feel?"
I've been asking myself this for the past forty minutes, through three red lights and a stretch of road where I stared out the window at the dark and tried to put language around something that keeps resisting it. I know the word for what I want. I've known it since the first family dinner at Rovin's, maybe before that, maybe since the first time I watched Volody pull Liv into his chest and felt something in me note the movement with more attention than it warranted.
I know what I want. I've just been waiting to want it at the right time, which Katriona spent six months telling me didn't exist.
"I want it," I say. "With you. I want it all."
She holds very still in my hands. Her pulse is quick against my palms. She isn't afraid of the words, I can see that, she was never someone who flinched at direct things, it was one of thefirst reasons I couldn't look away. But she's doing the thing she does when something matters enough to slow down, turning it carefully, making sure she's understood it right.
"You want a baby," she says. Not a question, but a test of the sentence in the air.
"I want the life that's sitting in that hospital room wrapped in white cotton," I say. "I want to sit beside you the way Rovin was sitting beside Claudia, like everything I've built has found its reason. And I want someone to hand me something I made with you, and for it to look at me the way that boy looked at me tonight, like I'm already old news."
The corner of her mouth twitches in a way that tells me she is holding back a laugh.
