"How many is many?"
Valerio appeared to do math. This took a moment, and the moment did not reassure her.
"It's our home now," he said instead of a number, which was cheating, and also made her throat go tight, so it was probably very effective cheating.
Louis, meanwhile, conducted a formal survey. He tested the echo in the front hall, opened a bathroom, reported with awe that the bathroom was bigger than their apartment, opened a second bathroom, reported that this one was also bigger than their apartment, and located his own bedroom, which he inspected for approximately nine seconds before appearing back in the doorway of theirs that night, rabbit under his arm, with the expression of a boy who had absolutely no intention of sleeping thirty feet away from a brand-new father.
He didn't even have to ask. Valerio simply lifted the blanket.
Louis burrowed in between them with a wriggle of pure satisfaction, arranged the one-eared rabbit against his chest, and issued his request to the ceiling.
"Tell me a story, Papa."
There was a silence that Aislinn would treasure for the rest of her life, the silence of a man who had bought a hotel in forty minutes encountering a problem with no acquisition strategy.
"A story," Valerio said.
"A made-up one. That's the rule."
"Very well." A pause. Then, like a man opening a board meeting: "Once upon a time, there was a kingdom. It was well managed."
Aislinn bit down on her lip.
"The king had significant holdings," Valerio continued. "Land. Ships. A very good army, which he paid on time, which is important. One day, a dragon arrived and made demands. The demands were unreasonable. So the king had a meeting with the dragon, and explained the dragon's position to it clearly, and the dragon saw sense and relocated. The kingdom's quarterly outlook improved. The end."
Silence.
"They lived happily ever after," he added, in the tone of a footnote.
Louis was staring at his father with an expression of profound diplomatic effort. "That was..." He searched. "It had a dragon in it."
"It was very informative," Aislinn managed, with heroic sincerity, "about the importance of payroll."
More silence. Louis patted his father's arm supportively, which somehow made everything worse, and Aislinn briefly smothered herself in her pillow, and when she came up for air Valerio was looking back and forth between them with dawning, wounded comprehension.
"I suck at this, don't I?"
They burst into laughter, both of them, at the same instant. "Yes, you do."
"But you love me anyway?"
"Yes!" Louis said right away, immediately, arms going around his father's neck, rabbit and all, and Valerio held him with one arm like he'd been doing it for seven years instead of one day.
But Aislinn didn't answer.
She was staring at him, and he was staring at her across the small breathing hill of their son, and the room had gone small and warm around the three of them, and there were eight years in the look, and a library, and a promise made by a voice she was trying every day not to hear anymore.
And then she whispered it, so it belonged to him alone.
"I'll love you no matter what."
Something surfaced in his face, there and gone, too fast to name. He reached over their sleeping-in-progress son and touched her cheek, and no one said anything else, and that was how they fell asleep the first night, the three of them in one bed, one rabbit standing guard.
Chapter Nine
"ABSOLUTELY NOT," AISLINNsaid.
"You haven't heard the plan."
