When I get to her room, Valentina looks simultaneously like the most exhausted and most luminous person I have ever seen in my life.
She’s propped up against the hospital pillows, her dark hair damp at her temples, wearing a hospital gown that has no business being on someone this beautiful. A monitor beside her bed tracks two separate heartbeats in competing rhythms and then I hear it—two. There are two of them.
She opens her eyes when I step through the door.
“Lin.” Her voice breaks on the single syllable.
I cross the room in four steps and take her hand.
“I’m here,” I say. “I’m right here, Val.”
“I know you’re dealing with your dad and I know you’re—“ She stops, breathes through something that tightens her wholeface, and then comes back. “I know everything’s a mess. I just needed?—”
“You needed me.” I squeeze her hand. “So here I am. Stop explaining yourself.”
She laughs, and then immediately winces.
The next two hours are the most extraordinary of my life—and I have prosecuted murderers, survived a kidnapping, and kissed Matteo Vitale in an elevator. None of it compares to this.
I hold Valentina’s hand through contractions that come faster and faster, talking to her about nothing—about the thread counts in that nursery catalog she showed me at the café months ago, about the Percy Jackson series, about a particularly stupid witness I demolished in a deposition last month.
She laughs when she can. She grips my hand hard enough to bruise when she can’t. I let her.
The door opens at intervals—a nurse, a doctor with quiet instructions, Salvatore slipping in once to press his lips to his wife’s forehead with a tenderness so private I look away. He glances at me over her head when he straightens. Something passes between us. An acknowledgment.
Thank you, his eyes say.
I give him a small nod.
I stay.
They’re born twenty-three minutes apart.
A boy first, announced by a cry so indignant and immediate that the nurse actually laughs. Valentina collapses back against the pillows and says, “Oh, thank god,” in a voice scraped raw, and I realize I’m crying. I don’t remember starting.
Salvatore is at her side before the second breath, his hand over hers, his composure entirely gone. He looks undone in a way I imagine very few people have ever seen and I feel the sharp, certain knowledge that I am witnessing something sacred.
The girl comes next. Quieter at first, and then not.
When the nurse places the first baby into Valentina’s arms—her son, dark-haired and furious and so obviously a Vitale it’s almost funny—Val looks down at him and her entire face goes soft in a way I have never seen before. Not at her wedding. Not in all the years I have known her.
“Hello,” she whispers to him. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
I press my fingers over my mouth.
The nurse approaches me with the girl, wrapped tight, a small, scrunched face visible above the blanket.
“Would you like to hold her while mama gets settled?” she asks.
I look at Valentina. She gives me a small, exhausted nod.
I take her into my arms, and baby fever floods through me. She’s so damn cute and impossibly small.
Her eyes are closed, her mouth making small movements like she’s already rehearsing something. One tiny fist has worked its way free of the blanket.
I think about the first night. About the ceiling of the hotel penthouse and the thoughts I pushed away. I think about weeks of not letting myself consider certain possibilities. I think about Matteo’s voice, and what it might mean to build something with a man like that. Something permanent. Something that looks like this.
I don’t let myself finish the thought.
