Knox had climbed up beside her, careful, one hand on the edge of the blanket. Luca stood at Colt’s elbow, staring at thebaby Colt held with the focused attention of a child making a very serious assessment.
“Is he okay?” Luca asked.
“He’s perfect,” Colt said.
Luca considered this. “He looks like a potato.”
“Luca.” Knox, without looking up.
“He does.”
Colt’s mouth did something that was almost a smile. “You looked just like this when you were born.”
“I did not,” Luca said, with complete certainty.
Betty was beside Lilac, smoothing her hair back from her forehead. She said something too quiet for me to hear, and Lilac’s eyes filled. She didn’t try to stop it.
I stood at the back of the room and watched all of this. Most of the others had cycled through already — it was just the family now. Colt, Lilac, Betty, the boys.
And Bea. Still there, at Lilac’s other side. Lilac shifted and held the baby out to her, and Bea took him — careful, natural, with the confidence of a woman who has held babies before and isn’t afraid of them.
I thought of her apartment. Her voice, raw and wrecked, the night I’d gone to tell her the truth.I used to think about it. A little boy with your jaw and your serious face. A little girl with my hair. I’d already rearranged the furniture for children we hadn’t made yet.
She was holding someone else’s baby in a hospital room at four in the morning, and I wanted her so badly I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to be the man standing next to her. I wanted to be the reason she was holding a child. I wanted everything Colt had in this room — the exhausted wife, the boys crowded around her, the new life in his arms.
But I wasn’t there yet. I knew it the way I knew the sobriety was real — not because someone had told me, but because Icould feel the distance between where I was and where I needed to be. I was closer than I’d been six months ago. But closer wasn’t there.
I stayed long enough to see it. Then I stepped back into the hallway and let them have it.
The waiting room was still full. Brothers sprawled across chairs, old ladies dozing, Handful dealing a quiet hand of cards with whoever was still awake. Nobody had left. The whole club, still here at four in the morning, waiting.
Betty came out with the boys a while later — Knox half-asleep on his feet, leaning into her side, Luca following with his hand in hers, too tired to pretend he didn’t need it. She paused and looked back toward the room.
“You did good,” she said. To no one in particular. To all of it. Then she took the boys home.
Bea came through the doors next. She looked at me across the waiting room. Not the careful nod from earlier. A look that held longer than that. Then she was gone.
Colt came through the double doors. The room went quiet. “We named them,” he said.
I waited.
“Graham.” He looked down. “And Danny.”
Nobody spoke. The whole room held it — a dead prospect’s name given to a new life. Another name carried forward from a different darkness, older, from before Colt and I were brothers.
“Graham and Danny,” Colt said again, quieter. Then he turned and went back through the doors to his wife and his new sons.
The room was quiet. Then Handful flipped to the back of his book, ran his finger down the page, and looked up.
“House wins,” he said. “Nobody had Graham and Danny.”
A few brothers laughed. I did too. It was the right sound for that room at that hour — not disrespectful, just alive.
Chapter 33
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— Holden —
