Chapter 43
ELENA
Five Months Later
Mara has been on my kitchen counter for forty minutes talking about Danny’s mother and I have stopped pretending to do anything else because this conversation requires my full attention.
Also I can’t bend down to pick things up anymore so I’m standing at the counter with my hands wrapped around a glass of water and my stomach resting against the edge of it like a shelf.
“She asked me if I was serious about him,” Mara says, pulling another cracker from the box. “Those exact words. Are you serious about my son? Like I’ve been passing him notes in class.”
“What did you say?”
“I said I loved him.” She eats the cracker. “She cried. Danny cried. I nearly cried. It was a whole ambush.”
“Mara.”
“I know. It was beautiful. I just prefer to be emotionally prepared before I walk into things.” She looks at my stomach. “How are they today?”
“Nikolai has been kicking my ribs since six this morning,” I say. “Mikhail is kicking too, somewhere I can’t identify, and that is somehow worse.”
She looks at my face. “You look tired.”
“I’m growing two people. I’m allowed to be tired.”
“You look more tired than yesterday tired.” She tilts her head. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine, Mara. Tell me the rest of Danny’s mother’s story.”
She opens her mouth.
I feel it.
Not a kick. Not the familiar pressure of two small bodies rearranging themselves. A tightening, low, spreading across my entire abdomen in a wave that stops my breath and makes my hand go flat against the counter.
“Elena.” Mara is off the counter.
“I’m okay,” I say, and then the second one comes, harder, and I’m not okay, and I look at Mara, and she looks at me, and her face has gone completely white.
“That’s not Braxton-Hicks,” she says.
“No.”
“You’re not due for—” She stops. “Elena. You’re not due for three more weeks.”
“I know.”
“So why are you—”
“Mara.” I look at her. “Get me Roman!”
She already has her phone out.
Roman gets me to the Kessler facility in eleven minutes.
I know this because I’m counting things, the way you count things when your body is doing something large and frightening, and counting gives your brain somewhere to be.
Eleven minutes from the moment he came through the penthouse door with his jacket half-on and his phone already in his hand, he took one look at me, braced against the kitchen counter and said, “Let’s go,” in the voice he uses when a decision has been made and the only remaining variable is execution.
He doesn’t let go of my hand in the car.
He doesn’t let go of my hand in the corridor.
He doesn’t let go of my hand when Dr. Reyes comes in and checks me and looks up from the examination with the focused calm I have come to rely on, and says, “You are seven centimeters, these babies are coming today.”
Roman’s hand tightens around mine.
I look at him.
He looks at me.
“Okay,” I say to both of them.
The delivery is long.
I will not pretend otherwise. Four hours and forty minutes from the moment Dr. Reyes said today to the moment the room fills with the first cry, and every minute of it is its own experience that I’m not going to minimize by summarizing. Roman stays for all of it.
He doesn’t sit in the corridor, doesn’t step out for air, doesn’t check his phone.
He stands at the side of the bed and he holds my hand and when I tell him I can’t do this he says, “You are doing it right now.” When I tell him I need him to stop talking he stops talking, and when I tell him to talk again he talks.
He reads the room with the same attention he brings to everything that matters to him.
Nikolai arrives first, at four seventeen in the afternoon, announcing himself with a cry that fills the room immediately and completely.
Mikhail follows four minutes later, quieter, his eyes open almost immediately, looking at the room.
Dr. Reyes puts Nikolai in Roman’s arms.
I watch it happen.
Roman has held boardrooms. He has held a key in his hand in a lobby on 48th Street and understood the weight of what it meant. He has held a gun and the reins of an organization and the cold control of a man who doesn’t allow himself to need things.
He has never held anything like this.
He looks down at Nikolai in his arms, and his face does the thing it did at the ultrasound, open, undefended, stripped of every layer he keeps between himself and the world.
His jaw moves once, and he doesn’t speak, and I lie in the hospital bed with Mikhail against my chest and I look at my husband holding our son.
I think about everything that was at the beginning.
I think about everything it has become.
Roman looks up from Nikolai, and he finds my eyes across the room.
Neither of us says anything because there’s nothing left to say that is not already in this room, already in his face, already in the weight of a tiny boy in his arms, and the weight of another against my chest, and the silence of a moment that was always going to end up here.
It just took the long way.