He was holding Nova against his chest, and I was looking for my phone when I pulled the spare key from the kitchen drawer, set it on the counter, and said, "So you can stop buzzing me at six in the morning." He put it on his ring that night. Neither of us said anything about it after that. I lay awake in the dark and wondered when sharing a baby became sharing a key, and when sharing a key became something I couldn't name.
The fog came in pieces. The same robe two days running. A yogurt commercial that broke me on Thursday, a woman on a porch feeding a toddler in morning light, and I was crying before I understood why. Then I was crying about crying, about how tired I was of the tears showing up uninvited, about the fact that my body was doing things I hadn't authorized, and my mind was trailing three steps behind everything.
Astrid was drying the last bottle at the counter. She asked about the pediatrician appointment that afternoon, and whether I wanted company. I looked at her from the couch and watched myself answer from somewhere outside the conversation.
"Duke and I are going," I said. "We've got it."
She paused onDuke and I.Didn't comment. Set the bottle on the rack.
I'm not okay. I don't know how to talk about it.
The thought sat in my chest while Astrid moved through my kitchen, putting things in order, and I lay on the couch, giving her the version she could carry home with her.
The fog was not lifting the way the books said it would lift by week four. The crying was not slowing down. I was an L&D nurse who had coached a thousand women through the postpartum weeks, and I couldn't coach myself, and the distance between what I knew professionally and what I was living was the loneliest thing I'd ever felt.
Astrid hugged me at the door before she left. She held on for a beat longer than she meant to, her arms tight around myshoulders, her chin against the side of my head. She saw more than I wanted her to see, but she didn't push.
The waiting room at Hartsdale General's pediatric office smelled like hand sanitizer and the particular warmth of a room full of babies. Duke was beside me with Nova's carrier between us. He was in jeans and a Hartsdale Fire T-shirt, off-shift, the soft version of himself. I was wearing the cleanest of my three rotation outfits, hair up, the presentable I could manage.
A nurse called Nova's name. We went back.
The exam room was compact and bright, with a poster about infant CPR on the wall beside the light switch. The intake nurse was someone I recognized from the floor, a woman named Priya who gave me a polite nod and nothing more. She was professional enough to keep it flat. I appreciated that.
She handed Duke a clipboard while I was undressing Nova on the exam table.
"Father's information," she said.
Duke took the clipboard. He didn't hesitate. He didn't look at me. He sat in the chair beside the exam table and started filling it out, pen moving across the boxes with unhurried certainty.
His name. His birthday. His phone number. His address. Father. He checked the box. He filled the line.
I stopped moving.
Nova was half-undressed on the exam table, one arm out of her onesie, looking at the ceiling with the expression of a baby who had opinions about being cold. I was looking at the wall. The CPR poster. The light switch. The corner where the wall met the ceiling.
The form Duke just filled out was for the pediatrician's records. It wasn’t the form that mattered. The form that mattered was filed four weeks ago, with his name not on it. It was in a county office somewhere, stamped and processed, the birth certificate of a child whose father's section was blank. He didn't know. He sat in this chair, filling out a pediatric intake form with his full name and phone number because he was her father, and it didn't occur to him that any version of this existed where he wouldn't be.
He didn't know. He didn'tknow.
I picked Nova up off the table and held her against my chest.
The pediatrician came in. Dr. Larsen was calm and thorough. She asked about height, weight, the soft spot, the reflexes—Nova did the reflexes with mild offense, her face scrunching at the light, her foot pulling back from the touch with the personal affront of a person who had been alive for four weeks and already had opinions about being handled. Duke laughed once, softly, beside me.
Questions were fired off about feeding, sleeping, and the routine. I answered peer to peer, fast and clean. She listened, nodded, and kept moving.
Duke held Nova on the exam table while Dr. Larsen checked her back, his hand spanning her entire back, fingers spread, palm covering her from shoulders to hips. Dr. Larsen glanced at it.
"That's a big hand for a little baby," she said.
"Yeah," Duke said.
I watched his hand on her back and tucked it away with everything else I wasn't letting myself feel.
Vaccines would be at the next visit. We dressed Nova together the way we did everything now—me working the onesie, Duke holding her legs still, four weeks of practice turning two people into something that moved without negotiation.
The parking lot was warm, the late sun coming sideways across the cars. I was at the passenger door of Duke's truck with Nova in the carrier when he came around to put her in the back himself.
I said it before I meant to.
