Chapter Twenty-Four #2
I looked at Mitch. At Sterling. At the warm yellow walls of the bedroom we had built together, and I thought, clear as anything: We’re having a baby, actually having a baby.
The contraction eased.
The room held.
Sterling’s hand settled on my shoulder, warm through the thin fabric of my t-shirt, and he didn’t say anything, which was perfect, because Sterling not saying anything was its own kind of eloquence, and right now it was exactly what I needed.
Labor unfolded the way Jasper said it would—not fast, not slow, just steady and specific and entirely its own thing.
He worked with the calm of a man who had done this nine thousand times and would do it nine thousand more, keeping up a low commentary I found genuinely helpful in a way that surprised me.
“That’s good pressure,” he’d say, or “Breathe through the peak,” and I’d do it because Jasper’s voice carried the authority of someone who knew what he was talking about and wasn’t performing it for anyone’s benefit.
Mitch held my left hand. His grip was warm and solid and slightly too tight, which was Mitch—everything at 110 percent, even restraint.
Sterling stood at my right shoulder with his hand braced against the small of my back, not moving, just there, a solid weight I could lean into when the contractions hit. He didn’t talk. Sterling Callahan rationed words in the best of circumstances, and these were not the best of circumstances.
At one point, between contractions, he leaned down. His mouth was close to my ear, his breath warm against my skin, and he said, very quietly, just for me: “You’re doing good.”
Three words. From Sterling, that was approximately equivalent to anyone else writing an epic. I reached up and squeezed his wrist, once, hard, and didn’t say anything because my throat had done something complicated and words were currently surplus to requirements.
I did not cry.
Okay, I cried a little.
The “don’t call me baby” exchange happened at eight-forty-three, according to Mitch’s watch, which he was checking approximately every thirty seconds.
“You’re doing so good, baby,” Mitch said, during a contraction that had my entire attention and did not need commentary.
“Don’t call me baby right now,” I said, through what I felt was considerable restraint.
“What should I call you?”
“Nothing. Don’t say anything.”
“Okay.”
Thirty seconds later: “You’re really doing so good though.”
I would have thrown something at him if I hadn’t been using both hands to hold onto the two of them like they were the only solid things in a room that had decided to move.
Mitch’s face was doing that thing—the warm, slightly wrecked expression he usually kept just under the humor—and I loved him so completely at that moment that it almost hurt.
The first baby arrived at 9:47 a.m. A boy.
Big. Loud in the specific way that suggested he had opinions and the vocabulary of none.
Jasper said “Here he is” and placed him on my chest, damp and warm and impossibly real, and the sound he made—that first indignant wail—filled the bedroom and something behind my sternum all at once.
Mitch made a sound. Not a word. Something low and stunned and completely undone, the kind of noise that came from somewhere behind his armor when the armor wasn’t fast enough.
Sterling’s grip on my shoulder tightened once, hard, before he let go. I felt his whole body go still behind me, the stillness of him encountering something he had no operational framework for.
I looked down at the baby’s face. At the dark hair, the scrunched features, the mouth already working like it was preparing a speech.
“Oh,” I said.
Just that.
“He looks like Sterling,” Mitch said.
“He’s two minutes old,” Sterling said. “How can you tell?”
“He has your jaw.”
“Newborns don’t have jaws.”
“That one does,” Mitch insisted, and he was right—there was something in the set of the tiny mouth, the stubborn angle, that was unmistakably, irrevocably Sterling.
Jasper, still working, said without looking up: “If everyone could focus,” and we focused, because Jasper’s voice carried that authority, and also because there was, apparently, more work to do.
Eleven minutes later the second boy arrived. Also big. Also loud.
Mitch was crying now, not pretending otherwise, tears running freely down his face as he held my hand and said, voice breaking: “There’s two of them, Caleb. There’s actually two of them.”
As though this was new information. As though we had not known about the twins for months, had not built a nursery for two, had not picked out two names and argued about a third just in case.
“Mitch,” I said.
“I know. I know. I just…” He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to. His hand was warm in mine, shaking slightly, and I squeezed it and didn’t let go.
Then Jasper said, with the admirable calm of a man delivering weather, that he was detecting a third baby.
The room went quiet for approximately two seconds.
The kind of quiet that had weight, physical weight, pressing against the walls and the ceiling and the three men standing in various states of undone.
“I’m sorry, what?” Mitch asked.
Jasper’s hands didn’t stop moving. “There’s a third baby. He or she was hiding behind their brothers. It happens. Not often, but it happens.”
“Holy shit,” Mitch said, then immediately: “Sorry. Sorry again. That’s twice. I’m on a list.”
Sterling said nothing. He had gone very still in the specific way he went still when something had happened that exceeded every contingency plan he had ever written.
I could feel it against my back—the complete, total recalibration of a man whose understanding of the world had just been revised in real time.
“Sterling,” I said.
“There are three,” he said.
“There are three.”
“You had three.”
“Apparently.”
“That is…” He stopped. “That is…” Stopped again.
Mitch, through tears: “He’s buffering.”
“I am not buffering,” Sterling insisted.
Jasper cut through: “The third one is coming now, so if we could all—” and everyone refocused immediately, because Jasper’s voice had that quality, and also because the third contraction was already building and my attention had places to be.
The girl was smaller than her brothers and not quiet. She arrived with opinions. Loud, specific opinions delivered at a volume that suggested she had been waiting her turn and was not pleased about the delay.
Jasper placed her on my chest and she stopped crying almost immediately, which Jasper said was remarkable.
“It’s just good taste,” I said. “She knows quality when she sees it.”
Mitch, who had given up entirely on not crying, said: “She knows you.” His voice broke on the last word, raw and open in a way Mitch rarely allowed himself, and I looked at him and felt something so large and specific in my chest that I could not hold it all at once.
The kind of feeling that had no adequate container, that spilled out the edges and filled the room and kept going.
Then Sterling looked at her. Looked at his daughter.
And I watched his face do something it almost never did—open completely, unguarded, a little bit wrecked around the edges.
The armor came down. All of it. Every piece, every plate, every wall he had built over years of operations across nineteen continents, and what was underneath was raw and warm and entirely without performance.
He reached out one careful hand and touched her cheek with one finger. The lightest possible contact. She turned toward it. Her tiny mouth worked, and Sterling exhaled like a man setting down something he had been carrying for years.
“Hi,” he said. Very quietly. Just that. To a person approximately two minutes old.
I had to look at the ceiling. The warm wooden boards caught the morning light and held it, steady and certain, and I blinked hard and didn’t apologize. Mitch made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob. Undignified.
Entirely Mitch.
Sterling, without looking up from her face: “Stop that.”
“I’m not doing anything,” Mitch said.
“You’re making a noise.”
“It’s an emotional noise. It’s appropriate.”
“Pull it together.”
“You just said hi to a baby,” Mitch pointed out.
“That’s different.”