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He looks at the box in my arms. “Is that lasagna?”

“It is.”

“Homemade?”

“Well duh.”

He steps back to let me in, already reverent. “Ivy. Olivia made the lasagna. The homemade one.”

“Do not tell me that until I’m sitting down,” Ivy calls from the couch. “I will cry, and I’m already at capacity.”

The condo looks like it lost a small war. A bouncer, a bassinet, a second bassinet for reasons no one explains, a pump still assembled on the counter, and a stack of tiny clothes folded with a precision that will not survive the week. Goliath, their enormous white cat, watches all of it from the top of the bookshelf as if he’s the landlord who did not approve this renovation.

Charlie herself is a week and a half old. She is very small and, at the moment, entirely Gray’s. He has not put her down. I get the sense he has not put her down in some time.

I set the lasagna on the one clear square of counter and hold up the rest. “I also come bearing diapers.”

Ivy’s eyes fill immediately. “You didn’t.”

“Two boxes.”

“Gray.” Her voice wobbles. “She brought diapers.”

“I heard, baby. It’s a good day.”

Then I produce the whale.

Gray looks at it for a long moment.

“You know she won’t have teeth for like six months,” he says.

“I’m aware.”

“She currently cannot hold up her own head.”

“Also aware.”

“So this is a gift for future Charlie.”

“It’s a gift for fun Charlie,” I say. “Somebody has to think about her long-term joy.”

Ivy is crying again. “It’s a whale.”

“It’s a whale,” I confirm.

I take the armchair, the only surface not colonized by baby equipment, and ask the question I came to ask.

“So. How’s it going?”

Gray exhales like he’s been waiting all day for someone to ask, handing Charlie to Ivy so she can feed her.

Then he tells me. All of it. He tells me she makes a sound in her sleep that he has already recorded eleven times. He tells me the first night home he stood over the bassinet until three in the morning to make sure she kept breathing, that he knows it isn’t sustainable, and that he doesn’t care. He tells me about the two a.m. feeding where he cried, and a diaper blowout that reached her shoulders, which he describes with the gravity of a man recounting a house fire.

Ivy nods along to every word, Charlie latched and feeding, one hand resting on that impossibly small back. She doesn’t add much. She just watches Gray talk about their daughter like it’s the best song he’s ever heard.

“Okay, my turn,” she says when he finally takes a breath. “Because he will never tell you himself.”

Gray shifts on the couch, already bracing. “Ivy.”