I did not cry.
Okay, I cried a little.
The “don’t call me baby” exchange happened at eight-forty-three, according to Mitch’s watch, which he was checking approximately every thirty seconds.
“You’re doing so good, baby,” Mitch said, during a contraction that had my entire attention and did not need commentary.
“Don’t call me baby right now,” I said, through what I felt was considerable restraint.
“What should I call you?”
“Nothing. Don’t say anything.”
“Okay.”
Thirty seconds later: “You’re really doing so good though.”
I would have thrown something at him if I hadn’t been using both hands to hold onto the two of them like they were the only solid things in a room that had decided to move.
Mitch’s face was doing that thing—the warm, slightly wrecked expression he usually kept just under the humor—and I loved him so completely at that moment that it almost hurt.
The first baby arrived at 9:47 a.m. A boy. Big. Loud in the specific way that suggested he had opinions and the vocabulary of none. Jasper said “Here he is” and placed him on my chest, damp and warm and impossibly real, and the sound he made—that first indignant wail—filled the bedroom and something behind my sternum all at once.
Mitch made a sound. Not a word. Something low and stunned and completely undone, the kind of noise that came from somewhere behind his armor when the armor wasn’t fast enough.
Sterling’s grip on my shoulder tightened once, hard, before he let go. I felt his whole body go still behind me, the stillness of him encountering something he had no operational framework for.
I looked down at the baby’s face. At the dark hair, the scrunched features, the mouth already working like it was preparing a speech.
“Oh,” I said.
Just that.
“He looks like Sterling,” Mitch said.
“He’s two minutes old,” Sterling said. “How can you tell?”
“He has your jaw.”
“Newborns don’t have jaws.”
“That one does,” Mitch insisted, and he was right—there was something in the set of the tiny mouth, the stubborn angle, that was unmistakably, irrevocably Sterling.
Jasper, still working, said without looking up: “If everyone could focus,” and we focused, because Jasper’s voice carried that authority, and also because there was, apparently, more work to do.
Eleven minutes later the second boy arrived. Also big. Also loud.
Mitch was crying now, not pretending otherwise, tears running freely down his face as he held my hand and said, voice breaking: “There’s two of them, Caleb. There’s actually two of them.”
As though this was new information. As though we had not known about the twins for months, had not built a nursery for two, had not picked out two names and argued about a third just in case.
“Mitch,” I said.
“I know. I know. I just…” He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to. His hand was warm in mine, shaking slightly, and I squeezed it and didn’t let go.
Then Jasper said, with the admirable calm of a man delivering weather, that he was detecting a third baby. The room went quiet for approximately two seconds. The kind of quiet that had weight, physical weight, pressing against the walls and the ceiling and the three men standing in various states of undone.
“I’m sorry, what?” Mitch asked.
