I stared at him—of all the people I expected to come through that door, Burke’s quiet, unsettling brother was not on the list—but Sterling went directly to the sink without ceremony, turned on the water with a single practiced motion, and began washing his hands with the unhurried competence of a man who’d handled worse.
“Water broke?” he asked, not turning to look at me.
I shook my head, then remembered he couldn’t see it. “No. Just contractions. Two minutes apart.”
Sterling nodded once and reached for a towel from the rack beside the sink. “You’ve done this before?” he asked, voice carrying that careful neutrality I recognized from my own time in the NICU.
“Yes,” I said, each word precise despite the breath still catching in my throat. “Just not from this side of the table.”
Something moved across Sterling’s face—not quite a smile, but adjacent to it, a softening around the eyes that made my chest tighten. “I’ve done it a few times,” he said, voice carrying the matter-of-fact warmth of a man who didn’t need to perform competence for anyone’s benefit. “Brandon’s birth, for one. Burke and Danny’s place. It was just me and Danny. Burke didn’t arrive until after the fact.”
He glanced at Decker with something that might have been amusement, then moved to the end of the table.
“Let’s see what we’re working with,” he said, already reaching for the sheet. “Decker, you want to stand at the head of the table? Jasper’s going to need something to hold onto in a minute.”
I decided, watching Sterling position himself at the end of the table, that I did not care who was in this room as long as someone competent was standing where he was standing. The next thirty minutes were the longest of my life—contractions relentless, my grip on Decker’s hand going white-knuckled, teeth gritted through the worst of them, pushing when Sterling told me to push, breathing when Decker’s voice, low and steady at my ear, told me to breathe.
Decker’s free hand kept finding my shoulder, my hair, the side of my face—brief, definitive touches that registered somewhere beneath the calculation of what was happening to my body.
He talked to me in the same quiet tone he used when something mattered and he didn’t want to make it bigger than it was.
“You’re doing perfect,” he said. “Just like that. One more push.”
I pushed—hard enough that spots appeared at the edges of my vision, hard enough that my throat hurt from the sound I couldn’t quite keep inside—and then the baby’s cry filled the room before I fully understood it was over.
A sound—high and insistent and exactly right—landed somewhere beneath my sternum with enough force that my breath caught in my throat.
Sterling lifted the infant with careful movements, one hand supporting the head, the other braced against the tiny back, and set him on my chest with a single, smooth motion.
“Congratulations,” he said, voice carrying that matter-of-fact warmth I recognized from my own time in the NICU. “It’s a boy. Healthy lungs on this one.”
My hands came up around the baby automatically—the nurse’s hands, checking and counting and confirming, fingers moving through the full newborn assessment with the practiced precision of someone who’d done it a thousand times before.
Head circumference normal. Chest rising and falling with each breath. Color good—no cyanosis, no pallor, just the reddish-purple that happened in the first minutes after delivery. Extremities moving with appropriate strength. Cry strong and sustained.
Five fingers on each hand. Five toes on each foot. Eyes open and tracking, pupils responsive to the light when Sterling movedthe examination lamp. No obvious anomalies, no concerning findings, just the rightness of a healthy newborn doing exactly what healthy newborns were supposed to do.
Somewhere in the middle of that inventory, the clinical part of me stepped back, and what was left was just a man holding his son for the first time.
The baby passed every part of it, and the relief was physical—a loosening in my chest I’d been holding since the first contraction, a warmth that started behind my sternum and radiated outward to my fingertips.
Sterling worked around us checking the umbilical cord, wiping the baby’s face with a warm cloth, helping me position him against my chest so he could latch if he was ready.
“He looks like you,” Decker said, voice carrying that careful neutrality I recognized from the early days, before he’d decided I was worth trusting. “Same nose. Same mouth.”
I looked up at him—really looked, not the quick assessment I’d been doing between contractions, but the attention of a man who wanted to memorize a moment—and found a single tear tracking down his cheek.
I had never seen him cry before—had never seen anything get through the careful surface of him like this, had never witnessed a moment when calculation gave way to feeling. It landed somewhere beneath my sternum with enough force that my own breath caught in my throat.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
Decker nodded once—tight, definitive—and then said, “I’m perfect. I have everything I ever wanted right here in this room.” His voice roughened on the last part, the catch in it audible even over the baby’s cries. “Even when I didn’t know I wanted it.”
I reached up with my free hand, put my palm against his cheek, and pulled him down into a slow, deliberate kiss. Thebaby was warm between us, his breathing gradually evening out as he settled against my chest.
“Welcome home,” I said when we broke apart, meaning it the way I’d meant it the first time I’d said it, and more.
Decker’s hand came to rest on the baby’s back—careful, almost reverent, the touch of a man who’d decided something mattered and wasn’t worried about who saw it.
