Page 78 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“That sounds about right.” He glanced toward the bassinet, and I watched his whole body angle toward it the way a plant leans toward a window. “Can I see her?”

Amai’s arm came out—not violent, not dramatic, just a hand flat against Kaisen’s chest before he could take another step, easy the way you’d stop a kid from touching a stove.

“You can see her from right there.”

“I wasn’t asking to hold a grenade, Amai.” Kaisen’s voice stayed level, but I heard the strain underneath it, the effort it took to keep it that way. “I asked if I could see her.”

“And I answered.” Amai didn’t move his hand. “You can look at her from where you’re standing. That’s what you get.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I know what you asked.” Amai’s jaw was doing that thing where the muscle in his cheek ticked, slow, steady, a metronome for how close he was to losing whatever patience he’d walked in with. “You asked if you could hold her. And the answer’s no.”

“Amai.” I said it low, more tired than sharp, because I didn’t have the energy for whatever this was about to turn into. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine.” He didn’t look at me when he said it. He kept his eyes locked on Kaisen like Kaisen was a door he needed to keep shut with his whole body. “We in a good place right now, but we ain’t in that good of a place. Not good enough for you to be holding my fuckin’ daughter.”

The word landed the way words land when a man’s been carrying them around for months, waiting for a reason to say them out loud. My daughter. Not our daughter, not the baby, just mine, flat and final, a line drawn so clean you could’ve used it as a level.

Kaisen’s face didn’t do anything dramatic. That was almost worse than if it had. He just nodded, slow, like a man absorbing a verdict he’d already half-expected.

“Understood,” he said.

“Amai.” I said his name again, softer this time, and he finally looked at me. I wasn’t defending Kaisen—I want to be clear about that. I just didn’t have it in me to referee a pissing contest in a room where my daughter was sleeping four feet away. “Can we not do this right now? I just had a baby, y’all.”

Amai’s shoulders came down half an inch. He didn’t apologize. He wasn’t built for that particular gesture. But he stepped back, put a little air between himself and Kaisen, and that was as close as I was going to get.

Kaisen reached into the biggest of the gift bags and pulled out a stuffed animal, a soft brown bear with a little knit scarf around its neck, the kind of thing you’d find in a boutique that didn’t put price tags where you could see them without asking. It was too nice for a newborn who wouldn’t be able to hold her own head up for months. The kind of gift somebody buys when they’re thinking two, three years down the line, imagining a toddler dragging it around by one ear.

He held it out to me instead of putting it with the rest.

“Can I ask what her name is?”

I took the bear because it seemed rude not to, turning it over once in my hands, feeling the weight of the thought behind it more than the weight of the toy itself.

“Trumai Delphine Landry.”

Something moved behind his eyes when I said it—quick, there and gone, the kind of flicker you’d miss if you weren’t already looking for it. I was already looking for it because of the slip five minutes earlier.

“That’s beautiful,” he said, and his voice had gone quieter, rougher at the edges. “Trumai. Truth and Amai.”

“That’s the idea,” I said.

“And Delphine for your mama.”

“Yeah.”

He nodded again, slower this time, his gaze drifting past me toward the bassinet. He looked at her the way you look at something you’ve already spent a long time imagining, like he was checking the real thing against a picture he’d been carrying around in his head. I couldn’t have told you exactly what was wrong with the look. If somebody had asked me to point to it on a page, I couldn’t have. But it sat wrong on me all the same, the same way that word daughter had sat wrong five minutes earlier, and I found myself watching him watch her a beat longer than I needed to.

“She’s got Amai’s mouth,” he said. “I can tell even from here.”

“She’s got my mouth,” I said, though I wasn’t sure why it mattered to correct him on a detail that small.

“That too.” He smiled, and it looked real enough, tired around the edges but real. “Congratulations. Both of you. I mean that.”

“Thank you,” I said, because there wasn’t really another right answer to give a man standing in a hospital room holding grief and gift bags in the same two hands.

Amai checked the clock on the wall, the kind of deliberate glance that wasn’t really about the time. “Visiting hours ended twenty minutes ago.”