Micah said, grinning, "Are you going to start driving a minivan?"
"Micah, I will put you through that wall."
The crew laughed. I laughed. But Halsey's words stayed with me after the laughter cleared, because he wasn't wrong.
I'd been the guy with somebody on a Tuesday. I'd liked it. The ease of it, the lightness, the goodbyes that cost nothing because nothing was at stake. That was a life that worked, and it worked for a long time, and I'd never once sat in it and felt like something was missing.
Now I was running on four hours of sleep, and my shoulders ached from walking a baby in circles at three in the morning, and the strange thing—the thing I hadn't expected and didn't know what to do with—was that it was giving me something the old life never had. Not the exhaustion. Not the schedule. The moment when Nova fell asleep on my chest, her whole body going still against mine, her fist loosening in my shirt. She was a newborn. She wasn't choosing me. She didn't know what choosing meant. But my body knew what it felt like to be the person she went quiet against, and that feeling was doing something to me I hadn't budgeted for.
Easton walked past the island on his way to the bay. He didn't say anything.
The morning went on. I sat at the island, finished the burnt eggs, drank the coffee, and let the easy version of myself sit in this room doing what it did. In twelve hours, I would be in a different room, at a different counter, with a different version of myself—the one who carried the baby, brought the coffee, and sat on the floor beside the bouncer.
The two versions hadn't met yet. They were living in separate rooms of the same life, and I was the man walking between them.
The coffee from the place on Main was in the bag on my passenger seat. Audrey's order—the oat milk thing she'd been drinking since the pregnancy, the one with the name I refused to learn because calling it "Audrey's coffee" was funnier, and she hadn't corrected me. I pulled up to her building in the late morning, at the end of my twenty-four, the tired sitting behind my eyes—not a bad shift, just a long one.
The spare key had been on my ring for weeks. She gave it to me early on, without ceremony, while I was holding Nova and she was trying to find her phone. She pulled it out of a kitchen drawer, set it on the counter, said, "So you can stop buzzing me at six in the morning," and went back to looking for her phone. I put it on my ring that night. Neither of us had said anything about it since.
I let myself in.
The apartment had changed in three weeks. The bouncer was in the living room beside the couch. The bottle drying rack sat on the kitchen counter next to the coffeemaker. A basket of folded onesies had been on the coffee table for two days. I picked it up on my way past. "Where do these go?"
"Top drawer," Audrey said from the couch without looking up. "The one that sticks."
I put them away.
Audrey was on the couch. Nursing. Hair up, no makeup, the robe loosely tied. She looked up when I came in.
"Tell me you got coffee."
I held up the bag.
She closed her eyes. "I love you."
"You mean the coffee, right?"
She opened one eye and glared at me.
"Just checking." I set it on the counter, crossed to the couch, and sat on the arm of it. I looked at the baby.
Nova was on Audrey's chest with her eyes closed, her fist curled against the underside of Audrey's jaw. She was bigger than she'd been three weeks ago. Her face had lost the compressed redness of the first days and settled into something that was starting to look like a person—a small, specific person with a dimple on her left side that I couldn't look at without feeling something rearrange in my chest.
"How was the shift?" Audrey asked.
"Quiet. A medical on Second that turned out to be a panic attack. A fire alarm at the middle school that turned out to be burnt popcorn in the teachers' lounge. Micah made the eggs. They were burnt. I ate them anyway."
"Halsey didn’t make them?"
My grimace said enough. "How was the night?"
"She was up at one. And three-thirty. And five." She looked at me with the flat honesty of a woman who had been awake since one. "I'm going to need you to hold her while I become a person again."
"Whenever you're ready."
She finished nursing. She fixed the robe without looking at me—practical, unbothered, the modesty she used to perform around me having worn off somewhere in the second week when I walked in on her pumping at the kitchen counter, and she looked up and said "If you're weird about this I'll kill you" and I said, "I'm not weird about this" and that was the end of it.
She passed Nova to me. I took her with both hands under her back and her head—steady now, no shaking, my body doing what it couldn't do in the first week. She settled against my chest. Her fist found my shirt.
