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“Two gifts,” she announces. “The first is in the foyer. Maxwell, the doors.”
Max opens the parlour doors, and two caterers wheel it in, and the room takes a collective breath and holds it, uncertain what it’s looking at.
It’s a pram. Victorian, iron-wheeled, navy body faded toward black, canopy fringed and tattered at one corner, the whole thing standing four feet tall and creaking faintly.
“It is an heirloom,” Catherine says. “Every York child since 1886 has been pushed in this pram.”
“That explains a lot about the family,” Jax says, through a mouthful of crab puff.
“It has been serviced,” Catherine continues, over him, “and the axles are original.”
“So is the tetanus,” Elena says, and photographs it, twice. “For the insurance,” she tells me, not quietly.
I look at the pram. One of our children will someday describe this object to a therapist. But Preston is smiling because his mother has just given the twins over a century of family history, iron wheels and all.
“The second gift,” Catherine says, “is smaller.”
She takes an envelope-sized box from her bag and crosses the room and hands it to Preston. No speech. No positioning of the room. She hands it to him and then she stands there while he opens it.
Preston lifts the lid.
Inside, on delicate tissue paper, is a teddy bear. Small. Brown, gone tan at the muzzle from handling and age. One eye, the other looks to have been ripped off at least a decade ago.
Preston doesn’t move.
I’ve been married to this man for almost two years now, and I have watched him receive gifts several times. He performs receipt the way other people perform surgery: cleanly, generously, everyone feeling better afterward. What he does now is nothing at all. He looks into the box, and his face comes off – the whole apparatus, the wit, the York finish – and underneath it is a man I recognise from exactly two other occasions, both of them in hospital corridors.
“You said–” His voice stops. Starts. “The Hamptons purge. Everything soft, you said. Gone. I looked.”
“I know what I said.”
“I was eight. I went through the garbage bags even.”
“I know,” Catherine says. “You were not thorough.”
Preston takes the bear out of the box like it might still be asleep. His thumb finds the missing eye.
“His eye is in an envelope in my desk,” Catherine says. “I never found the time.”
Never found the time. Almost two decades later, and yet she kept the eye.
Preston is crying. Openly, silently, in front of St. Jude’s and the Yorks and a fertility magnate in seafoam velour, holding a one-eyed bear, and he isn’t narrating it or apologising for it or making it charming, and nobody in this room has ever seen him do that, including me.
And Catherine watches her son, and for three seconds the General is off duty. Nobody else catches it; they’re watching Preston. I’m watching her. For three seconds she is a mother looking at the son she once could not understand, and then the three seconds end, and she touches his shoulder and walks away to interrogate the caterer before either of them has to survive being seen being emotional in public.
Preston laughs, wet, at nothing, and holds the bear up to Elena’s stomach and says something I can’t hear, and the party resumes around him.
Chapter 17
The Labour
PRESTON
Babies keep no calendar and honour no clock. I knew this in theory – the parenting class covered it, slide four, right before the diaper practicum.
It is entirely different information at 03:07.
I surface from sleep because the hallway light is on, and Luke is already sitting up – of course he’s already sitting up; he has treated sleep as a rumour since the second heartbeat – and Elena is standing in our bedroom doorway in her robe, hair wrapped, expression settled.
