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Not quietly.

Not tentatively.

She came into the world with the particular fury of someone who had decided the whole arrangement was deeply inconvenient and wanted everyone present to understand that immediately. The sound she made, that first sound, the one that told the room she had arrived hit me somewhere that bypassed my ribcage entirely and landed directly in the part of me that had been waiting for it, without knowing it was waiting.

The doctor said it's a girl and I wanted to shoot the cunt but then, I heard Emery's name in the room without anyone speaking it. Felt Miles and Neave in the room without anyone saying their names. Two absences and one arrival and all three of them landing at the same time in the same breath.

They put her on Toren's chest and I stood at the side of the bed and I looked at this person, this small, red, furious, perfect person who had my eyes and her mother's face and a set of lungs she was already using to full capacity and something happened to me that I don’t have a word for.

Not one word. Not in any language I have access to.

Everything I had been in the previous two hours, the fury, the pacing, the white-knuckled useless person standing in corridors, all of it drained out of me completely and left behind something I had no name for except this.

This is what I am now.

I put my hand over both of them. Over Toren's heart, over the warm impossible weight of our daughter, and I stood there and I let it be exactly what it was without trying to manage it or calculate it or hold any part of it at arm's length.

“Hi,” Toren said to her. Her voice was wrecked and soft and the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.

I couldn't speak.

She looked up at me. Eyes still wet, hair stuck to her face, completely undone and entirely radiant in a way that had nothing to do with how she looked and everything to do with what she had just done, and she smiled at me. I had to look away from it because I was not prepared for it and I am not the kind of man who lets things happen to his face in public.

“Emmerson,” I said, eventually. My voice came out differently. Lower. Like something had been rearranged in the mechanism of it.

“Emmerson,” Toren agreed.

“For Em.”

“For Em.” She lifted her eyes to mine. “And Kenna Nile.”

My throat closed as I stared down at her.

“For Neave, Miles and KennaDee,” she whispered quietly.

We looked at each other for a moment across the weight of those four names and everything they carried. I pressed my hand a little more firmly against them both and didn’t trust myself to say anything else.

Em, I thought. Miles. Neave. KennaDee. She's here.

She’s asleep in my arms.

Two months old, give or take. She has the unhurried, full-body sleep of someone who has decided the world can wait for her, which she gets from her mother, and she has her fist pressed against her cheek in that way she has, one fist, cheek, as if she's working through something complicated even unconscious, which she gets from nobody I can identify and which I have decided I prefer to think of as entirely her own.

The nursery is dark. The only light is the thin strip from the hallway under the door, which is open a crack because it’s always open a crack, because I have learned over two months that I cannot function in the next room if I can’t hear her.

Toren thinks I have anxiety.

She’s not wrong.

I rock slowly, the rhythm that works, the one I found by accident on the first night home when everything else had failed and I started moving out of pure desperation and she stopped crying like a switch had been flipped, and I look at the face of my daughter in the dark and I do the thing I do every night in this chair, which is try to find adequate language for what I am looking at and fail.

She has my eyes.

That’s the thing that gets me every single time. Those eyes, on this entirely new face, looking back at me with the particular unfocused intensity of a person who is seeing the world for the first few weeks and filing everything carefully. My eyes but without the things I have put behind them. Without the years of grief and strategy and the years before that of building walls that were supposed to keep things out and kept some things in instead.

Clean eyes.

The same color as mine, seeing everything fresh.