We lost a Clementine,something said, far under the part of me that could still make words.And here was another.
Then I looked at the second name, theLouisa, and thought of the woman who’d folded two orphaned kids into a family that already had a houseful of its own and never once made us feel like guests in it.
I couldn’t speak. I’d spent my whole life being the one who always had the line, the deflection, the dry thing, and I had nothing. So, I stood there, and looked at my brother, and let him watch me come apart.
“Yeah,” Liam said thickly, answering the thing I never managed to say. “Yeah. I know.”
They came in a flood— Owen first, hat already off and eyes already going; Louisa a half-step behind, both hands pressed to her mouth; Wyatt and Ivy, Ivy enormous now and navigating the doorway like a woman piloting a barge; Hunter and Callie; Maisie at a dead sprint with a fistful of crayon artwork for a cousin she hadn’t met yet. Too many bodies and not enough chairs, everyone talking over everyone, all of it love.
And Caleb was in it. Owen caught him by the shoulder and said something under his breath that made him duck his head. Hunter drifted over to stand at his elbow, the two of them not talking, which between those two counted as a full exchange.Maisie, finding every lap already taken, attached herself to the nearest large stationary object — Caleb’s leg — and stayed there, occasionally holding the drawing up for his review.
Liam had taken up a position. There was no other word for it. He’d planted himself at the head of the rolling bassinet, feet set, shoulders squared, scanning a room full of the people who loved him most on earth like a man clearing a perimeter — and every time a well-meaning aunt drifted within reach of the baby he did not move and did not speak and somehow communicated, with his entire body, that she would be touching this infant over his cooling corpse.
Clay watched Liam standing over the bassinet and barked a laugh.
“Oh, we’re in trouble.”
Liam frowned. “What?”
“You were already the Hulk.” Clay pointed at the sleeping baby. “Now the Hulk’s got a baby girl.”
The room went up instantly.
Liam looked down at his daughter, looked back at Clay, and didn’t even try to argue.
Which made everybody laugh harder.
“He’s not wrong, you know,” Steph offered from the bed, wrung out and radiant and missing nothing. “He hasn’t let go of my hand since Tuesday. I had to do the dishes one-handed.”
“That was one time,” Liam said.
“It wasfour days,baby.”
For about ten minutes, the room got to be still.
Settled, anyway — there was no quiet with a Blackwood within a county mile of you, but it was the settle a house finds after a storm’s gone through and left everything standing. Steph had the baby again, drowsy now. Owen had pulled Louisa half onto his lap in a chair. Liam had finally,finallylet go of something, and sat on the edge of the bed with his hand spreadflat over both of theirs, his guard come down to just this, just them.
So of course that was the moment Ivy made a small, surprised sound by the window and looked down.
“Oh,” she said, in the tone of a woman noting a mildly interesting development in someone else’s life. “Oh, that’s — Wyatt.Wyatt.Honey, I think — yeah.”
It took the room a beat to catch up. Then it caught up all at once.
“Oh, fuck.” Wyatt came off the wall like he’d been shot off it, every bit of color gone out of his face. “Oh, fuck, okay — okay —” He turned a full circle looking for something and came up with nothing, and Clay said, “There he goes,” with deep professional satisfaction. And Liam, who two hours ago couldn’t locate his own car keys, rose off that bedcalm,a man who had now Seen Things, and put a steadying hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Breathe, brother. You point the truck at the hospital. You’re alreadyinthe hospital. You’re gonna do great.”
“She’s two weeks early,” Wyatt said, to no one, to the universe.
“And this one was a week late,” Steph called from the bed, delighted. “They’ll share a birthday give or take a day.Cousins.” She said it like she’d planned the whole thing personally.
They swept Ivy out in a rising tide of voices and wheelchairs and someone hollering for the nurse, Wyatt towed along in the wake of it like a man handed the controls of an aircraft mid-flight — and the noise rolled off down the corridor and left a sudden, ringing, wonderful hole where all of it had been.
I’d ended up with Clementine somewhere in the chaos — somebody had needed two free hands and mine had been the nearest steady ones — and now she lay in the crook of my arm in the gold coming up through the glass, no weight at all andthe entire world both at once, eight pounds of it, asleep and frowning faintly at some newborn dream.
Caleb crossed the room to us. He didn’t reach for her — just came and stood close and looked down at her in my arms a long moment, and then at me.
“She’s been out cold ten minutes,” I said, low. “I keep checking she’s breathing. Occupational hazard.”
“She’s breathing,” he said. He’d been watching her too. “You going to give her up at some point, or do I have to fight your whole family for a turn?”
