Lashes stops halfway up.
Hope's turning her face into her neck and fussing, and Imani's gone still across the table.
I've got one hand coming up off my lap and half-reaching toward a baby I've got no business reaching for.
"Don't take her out." I make myself lower my hand. "Not on my account."
"Mila." She says it carefully. "I wasn't going to make it a?—"
"You were." My throat's doing something and I talk through it. "You've been doing it since I got here. You catch my eye across a room and you look away. You just stood up to carry her outbecause I'm sitting here, and I know why, and I need you to quit it."
The room's loud on every side and none of it comes near this table.
"I know what happened to you." Lashes lowers back down onto the bench, Hope on her shoulder, her hand spread flat on the baby's back. "I heard it in the office. I wasn't going to sit here and wave her at you."
"She's not being waved at me. She's being a baby."
"Mila—"
"I lost?—"
And it comes up out of me with edges on it and I can't get in front of it.
My eyes go hot and full so fast the room smears, and my breath catches high in my chest. I press the heel of my hand under my ribs like I can hold it down from the outside.
"I don't know how many. That's the piece I can't get past. I don't even get the number. They didn't let me keep one of them and they didn't let me keep count.
I've spent years not letting myself think about a single one, because thinking about them was the one thing down there that would've actually finished me."
Hope's stopped fussing. She's breathing against her mother's neck.
"And you kept yours," I say.
Lashes doesn't move.
"You were in the same kind of dark I was, and you got out, and you kept her." The tears are running now and I let them run, I don't wipe them, I keep my eyes on her. "And I've been across a table from you making myself not look at her, because I didn't know if I could look at her and stay in one piece. And I'm done. I looked at eleven doors in a hallway and I walked past every one of them. I can look at one sleeping baby."
Nobody says anything.
Then Lashes stands, comes around the table, and does the last thing I'd have guessed. She holds Hope out to me.
"Then hold her." Her voice isn't careful anymore. "You don't have to. But she won't break and neither will you, and I think you've had a bellyful of people deciding what you can carry."
I look at the baby.
A few months old, warm, a crease at her wrist where the fat folds over, and she smells like milk and something clean underneath it.
I take her.
She's heavier than she looks. They always are.
She turns her face into my collarbone, makes a small sound, and goes still against me, and I sit in the main room of a motorcycle club in a country I've never lived in, with a sleeping baby on my chest and a notebook full of the men who did this to both of us open on the table.
And I don't come apart.
I keep waiting for it and it doesn't come. I hold a baby and I stay in one piece.
"There it is," Lashes says, and sits back down, picks the pencil up off Imani's pad, and gets back to the book like nothing on earth just happened.
