7. Valentina #3
My brother—who has never in his adult life taken orders from anyone he didn’t choose to take orders from—looks at Cillian for a long moment then takes the sandwich.
Leo clearly was hungry because he ate the sandwich in about four bites.
My mother winces as he eats it and I fight the laugh.
My mother probably thinks her son is a barbarian with how fast he ate it.
But my attention is solely on Cillian, who is unreadable, but I also think slightly pleased that he got my brother to do something.
For not the first time, I think about the boy he must have been in Connor Brennan’s house, learning to read rooms and give people exactly what they need without asking. I feel something warm move through my chest that has nothing to do with the coffee.
He comes and sits beside me, which startles me.
The waiting room has enough chairs that he could sit anywhere. But he sits beside me.
“Thank you,” I say, quietly. “For coming.”
He looks at me with those steady blue eyes. “How’s she doing?”
“Surviving,” I admit, fingers tightening around the cup. “Twelve hours is a long time.”
“It is.” He’s quiet for a moment. “Em’s—she’s tough.”
“She really is.” I look at my red-painted fingernails. “Tougher than she should have to be today, honestly.”
He makes a noise of agreement, and I notice how tense he looks, the rigid lines of his body apparent to everyone.
I gesture toward her room. “Do you want to see her?”
He shakes his head. “No. I—I don’t, uh, want to see her in pain.”
I nod, not wanting to press him.
But even as we sit here, I’m aware of him—the warmth of him nearby, the particular quality of his silence that is not empty, that has always had something in it.
I think about Emma saying you like him.
Yeah. Probably. Dammit.
Leo staggers back out at about 1:30 a.m., looking scared and excited all at once. “It’s soon,” he says, and his voice is strange. “They said—soon.”
Then a nurse appears at the door and says, gently, that it’s time for everyone except Leo to please wait outside, and Leo disappears behind the door. It clicks shut, and there is just us.
The waiting room is still full at almost two in the morning.
We sit in uncomfortable chairs in a room with terrible lighting and the hum of a vending machine, knowing that on the other side of that door something is happening that is the most extraordinary thing in the world.
I reach over and take my mother’s hand.
I feel her squeeze, and I squeeze back, and we wait.
At two fourteen in the morning, just as I’ve started dozing off, the door opens.
We all jump up.
It’s a nurse and she’s smiling. “Seven pounds nine ounces,” she says. “Mother and baby are both doing beautifully.”
My mother closes her eyes in relief while Teresa makes a sound that is barely audible.
I press my free hand to my mouth and breathe and breathe.
Cillian puts his hand over mine on the armrest and doesn’t say anything, but from how tightly he’s squeezing my left hand, I know he’s overcome.
She’s here. Baby Santoro is here.
They let us back in one at a time and I go third, after Teresa and my mother.
Grandmothers deserve to see their granddaughter first.
When it’s my turn, I stand in the hallway outside Emma’s door with my hand on the wall and I try to get my face into some kind of order.
It’s not going well, which is fine.
Emma will understand.
I go in.
Emma looks like she has been through hell, but she has never been more beautiful.
She is propped against the pillows with her hair half undone from the braid and her face blotchy, but her eyes are bright.
She is holding a bundle that I know is a baby, but it doesn’t seem real until I get closer and it becomes real all at once.
She looks up and she gives me a huge smile before saying softly, “Come see your goddaughter.”
Oh.
Oh, she didn’t tell me that. She never told me that.
My eyes burn and my throat tightens. “Emma—”
“We wanted it to be a surprise,” Emma says, looking over at Leo, who nods. She tilts the bundle slightly toward me. “Come meet Seraphina Brennan Santoro.”
I move forward and stare down at the most beautiful creature in the world.
She is very small and pink with tiny lips and eyelashes a mile long. She has Leo’s dark hair already thick on her head, spilling out under her hat. Her tiny nose is entirely her own.
When her eyes flick open for a moment, they’re the dark unfocused blue of all new babies.
She has Emma’s ears but has Leo’s mouth, pressed into a small, determined line.
She is the most serious infant I have ever seen and she is perfect.
“Hi,” I whisper to her. She makes a small noise and I have to press my hand to my mouth again.
“Isn’t she beautiful?” Emma asks softly, gazing at her daughter with love.
“The most beautiful baby I’ve ever laid eyes on,” I tell her in a choked voice. But then I make the mistake of looking at my brother.
Leo is standing at the foot of the bed with his hands at his sides and he is crying.
He is looking at Emma and Seraphina with an expression I have never seen on him but I know I am going to see every time I look at him for the rest of his life.
Every wall is down, every piece of armor is gone.
It’s just him standing there being exactly as wrecked and grateful as he is.
He catches me looking and he doesn’t look away this time.
“She has Emma’s ears,” is all I can manage.
“She’s perfect,” he says, and it comes out cracked. He looks back at them, and I look at them too.
This.
This is what it looks like.
Not an arrangement.
Not a set of rules to manage proximity.
Not two people trying to hold each other at arm’s length while their bodies say something else entirely.
This is what it looks like when you’ve chosen someone, when you keep choosing them, when you’d burn the world down for them and they know it and they’d do the same.
This is Leo, who I watched be incapable of softness, standing at the foot of a hospital bed crying because everything he loves most in the world is in that room.
I want that.
The thought arrives with a clarity that almost hurts.
I want the real thing, but I don’t know if I’m going to get it. I don’t know what I have, to be honest, but I want the real thing, and I haven’t wanted it like this before.
I slip out of the room before I actually start crying.
I will not cry in front of my brother, not today.
Today is his.
I close the door softly behind me.
The hallway is empty.
The hospital is deep in its nighttime quiet.
I stand there with my back to the door and my hand still over my mouth and I let myself feel it for a moment—all of it, the relief and the love and the ache and the realization that I can’t take back now that I’ve thought it.
“Hey.”
I jump. Cillian is by me, two Styrofoam cups in hand, coming from the direction of the vending machines.
He looks at my face but doesn’t ask if I’m okay, because he can see that I’m not okay.
He just tilts his head toward the cafeteria.
I follow him.
The cafeteria at four in the morning is just us.
The smell of bad coffee and antiseptics is still strong in here, but I don’t even care at this moment.
He sets a cup in front of me and sits across from me.
I stare blankly at the Styrofoam and I don’t say anything for a moment. Neither does he.
“She’s beautiful,” I say, eventually, my voice hoarse. “Seraphina. She’s the most beautiful, angelic baby and she’s clearly unhappy about being outside of her mother’s womb.”
A small smile crosses Cillian’s mouth. “Smart kid,” he says.
“I’ve never seen a newborn scowl before, but I swear Seraphina was.” I take a sip and fight a gag.
God, it’s terrible.
But it’s also exactly what I needed. “Emma asked me to be her godmother. She decided to spring that little fun fact on me.”
His blue eyes soften. “That sounds like Emma. She always liked surprising people.”
“She does.” I look at the cup, feeling tears slide down my face. I wipe them away roughly.
Cillian studies me. “You know it’s okay to cry. Your niece being born is a huge, emotional occasion.”
“I’m not crying,” I shoot back, mortified he’s caught me. “I just have something in my eye.”
“Sure,” he says neutrally, which means he doesn’t believe me.
We sit in the quiet. I am so tired that the edges of things have gone slightly unclear, but I am also, underneath it, full—full of the night, full of Emma and Leo and Seraphina.
I’m full of something I haven’t had a word for that feels like it might be hope.