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"Wasn't going to."

I hold the door, and I stay exactly where I am until she's finished. When she's done, she wipes under her eyes with the middle knuckle of her index finger. I hand her the clean handkerchief I keep in my back pocket. She pulls her feet in, and I close the door.

At the condo, I ask her what time she wants to go back.

"Is seven stupid?"

"Seven's fine."

At ten to seven, I'm backing out of the lot with the empty bases behind us.

The mornings run the same after that. The weights are taped to the isolettes in grams, and grams mean nothing to me, so I do the arithmetic in my head and turn them into pounds. We get two feeds a day and forty minutes of skin-to-skin apiece. We go back to rest in between, either at Hildie's house or Lis' condo, and then we come again.

Somewhere in there, between hospital runs, Mackie starts falling asleep on the sofa with her feet in my lap every night. I stop asking if she wants anything from the kitchen and start bringing things because I know she needs them.

Graham's tube comes out on the fourteenth. Hildie's comes out on the sixteenth, and she takes a bottle right off.

I'm slow at learning the right way to hold and tip the tiny bottle for feeding. Bettina catches me the first day.

"Slow down. You're feeding him faster than he can breathe."

"How do I know when he's done?"

"He'll tell you. Watch his hands."

So I watch his hands. The trick isn't strength. It's stopping while there's still milk in the bottle, because a four-pound baby will work himself past tired and quit on you for the rest of the day. By the second week, Bettina sets the bottle in my palm and walks off without a word.

I don't know what to call a thing like that. It's the first time I've ever been good at something I couldn't finish by outlasting it.

Thursday afternoon I go see the babies without Mackie while she naps. When I get back, she goes through the pictures on my phone twice, stopping on a few to ask which one she's looking at. "That one's got your face. Poor thing."

"Hate it for her."

"When do you go back?" She hands me the phone and looks straight at me.

"Soon." I look down at the blank screen, then put the phone in my pocket.

"You know I'm okay here. I have Mom."

"Ranch is covered."

Eli's costing me more every day I'm here. I know exactly what the number is. I also know Mackie can't drive yet, Lis isn't always around, and the babies are still at the hospital.

I haven't found a number that makes me leave.

She catches my chin between her fingers and makes me look at her. "We'll be okay, Carson."

By the middle of the second week, both babies are taking every feed by mouth and gaining the way Bettina wants. For the first time, discharge is starting to sound like something that might actually happen.

They put us in a room at the end of the hall Wednesday night, one bed and two bassinets on wheels, with no isolettes and no monitors and no nurse coming through at ten and again at two.

"You know where the call button is," Bettina says, and then she's gone, and the door clicks, and it's the four of us and the hum of the air handler.

Mackie lies down first. I take the chair.

Graham fusses at eleven, and Hildie goes off at midnight, and somewhere after one they both go quiet at the same time, which is worse than either of them crying.

I get up and stand over Hildie's bassinet in the dark, laying my hand flat on her chest. Her entire tiny chest fits under my palm. There's no screen to check anymore, no green number climbing and falling, so I have to feel it myself. I count two rises and move to Graham and do the same.