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He didn’t get to hear her answer, because at that moment, the ambulance came screaming around the corner.
They were disrupted by a flurry of activity. Paramedics appeared with a stretcher and forced Adriano back so that they could reach Amy and the babies. They crowded around her and began to measure vital signs.
“Is everyone all right?” Amy asked anxiously. “Are the babies all right?”
One of the paramedics was smiling. “The picture of health,” he said. “This is a great story, isn’t it? Mother delivers healthy quadruplets on the banks of Lake Como.”
“Don’t let this be in the papers,” Amy groaned.
“It won’t be,” Adriano assured her. He would make the rounds tonight and make sure none of the news outlets had the story. If one of the paramedics talked, he knew he had the power and the influence to kill the story before it went to press.
“Coming in the ambulance, sir?” the smiling paramedic asked Adriano.
“He’s the father,” Amy said, by way of answer.
It was the most beautiful sentence Adriano had heard in his life.I’m the father.
It felt like she was reassuring him that she did want him around. That he would be able to be in the babies’ lives—and in her life—after all.
It felt like there was a chance that everything was finally going to be all right.
CHAPTER24
ADRIANO
“Iwish they hadn’t taken the babies,” Amy murmured sleepily.
“You’re barely awake,” Adriano said. “You wouldn’t be able to handle them right now.”
“I could handle them!”
Adriano laughed gently. “You can’t even keep your eyes open.”
It was sweet, seeing her disarmed like this. He was used to Amy being so alert and engaged with everything, but the birth had sapped her of her strength.
He wished he could crawl into the bed beside her and wrap his arms around her. He wanted to kiss her temple, to tell her how beautiful she looked and what an amazing job she had done bringing their children into the world. He wanted her to know that he was proud of her and that—after all this time, he could say it with full confidence and conviction—he loved her.
It was a conversation he didn’t know how to start. He didn’t know how to find his way in to telling her those things. Even if she had been fully alert, he wouldn’t have known what to say. As it was, he didn’t think she would understand his words, even if he could find them.
But then her eyes opened and she began to sit up.
“Don’t do that,” he protested, going to her side and trying to reposition her pillows so that she would be supported. “You’re supposed to be sleeping.”
“Who says?”
“All the books. You’re supposed to sleep when the babies are sleeping.”
“You’ve read books about it?”
“Of course I have,” he said. “What do you think I’ve been doing for the last eight months?”
“I didn’t know,” Amy said. “I’ve hardly spoken to you. I knew you were looking for books in the beginning, but I didn’t know you had gotten them, and I definitely didn’t know you had read any of them.”
“I read all of them,” he told her quietly.
For a long time, that had felt like the only thing he could do. Stuck in bed as he’d been, he hadn’t been able to engage with the pregnancy on any other level, so he had read books. Even later, when he had begun to doubt whether or not he had done the right thing by committing to becoming a father in the first place, reading parenting books had still felt all right somehow. It had given him a way to taste the future that lay ahead without feeling as if he was wading in too impossibly deep.
“You should share them with me,” Amy said. “I didn’t have any parenting books.”
