21. Celine
CELINE
I find him in his office at noon, the door open, and I sit across from his desk without being asked, which has become a normal thing between us now.
The absence of permission required is a marker of how much has changed since the first time I stood in this room with a folder and a fury I didn’t know where to put.
“What do they look like to you?” I say. “When you think about our child.”
He’s quiet for a moment, sitting with the question instead of immediately producing an answer.
“I imagine a girl,” he finally says.
“Me too,” I admit.
He says, “I keep trying to picture her, and I get as far as her hands. Small hands. Then I can’t get further than that.”
I look down at my own hands resting on my lap. “I keep thinking about her voice,” I say. “What she’ll sound like when she laughs. Whether she’ll laugh the way Lena does, all at once, no warning.”
“Lena’s laugh is difficult to prepare for.”
“It really is.”
He almost smiles, the corner of his mouth moving without fully committing, the version of amusement he allows himself in rooms with no audience.
“My mother used to laugh like that,” I say, before I’ve decided to.
“Loud, sudden. She’d cover her mouth after, embarrassed about it, but it was already out.
Lena got that from her completely. I always thought I took after my father.
Quieter. More information about things. He was the kind of person who’d be thinking about something for three days before he said a word about it. ”
“That sounds familiar,” Zane says.
I look at him. He’s watching me with the steady attention he gives things that matter to him, and I realize, sitting in his office at noon on a Tuesday, that I have never actually talked about my parents with him.
Not once. He knows about the house they left us, about the will.
He knows the facts. He doesn’t know my father used to read the newspaper out loud at breakfast, whether anyone was listening or not, or that my mother kept every drawing Lena and I ever made in a shoebox under the bed alongside the important documents.
“My father would have had opinions about you,” I say.
“What kind of opinions?”
“The suspicious kind, initially. He was careful about people. Took a long time to trust anyone new.” I pause. “But he respected competence. Once he decided you were good at something, that was it. You had him.”
“And your mother?”
“My mother would have decided in the first five minutes and spent the rest of the time pretending she hadn’t.” I smile despite myself. “She had very strong instincts and absolutely no patience for acting like she didn’t.”
He looks at me across the desk with a quietness that isn’t his usual controlled quietness. This one is different.
We eat dinner together that evening, which has become its own quiet ritual over the last several weeks, neither of us formal about it, just two people ending up in the kitchen at the same hour and not leaving.
I’m halfway through my plate when I ask the question I’ve been turning over since the list appeared on the counter this morning.
“Are you scared?” I ask.
He looks up. “Of what?”
“Her. Becoming a father. Any of it.”
He sets his fork down. “Yes,” he says, plainly. “I don’t know how to do this. Everything I’ve built in my life, I built by being willing to make decisions other people weren’t willing to make. A child doesn’t respond to that.”
“No,” I agree. “She won’t.”
“I’m aware that my default approach to most problems is going to be exactly wrong for this one.”
“Also, yes.”
He picks his fork back up. “Are you scared?”
I think about it honestly. “Of the pain, yes. Of being responsible for an entire person, yes.” I pause. “Of loving her, no. That part doesn’t scare me at all.”
He’s quiet for a moment.
“I think that’s the part that scares me most,” he says. “How fast it’s going to happen. How little I’ll be able to manage it once it does.”
I look at him across the table, and I think about my mother. She was twenty-four when she had me. Younger than I am now.
I know this not because she ever made a point of it but because I did the math once in middle school during a particularly boring history class and sat with the number for the rest of the afternoon, trying to imagine being twenty-four and suddenly responsible for an entire human being.
I couldn’t imagine it then. I’m still not sure I can imagine it now, even with the evidence of it pressing against my ribs every time the baby moves.
My mother never seemed scared. That’s the thing I keep coming back to. She moved through our childhood with a steadiness that I took for granted until she was gone and I understood that steadiness is not the absence of fear. It’s what you build on top of it when someone else needs you to.
I was seven the summer the house on Mercer got a leak in the roof.
My father was between jobs, the kind of between that stretched longer than anyone planned, and I remember lying in bed one night listening to them talk in the kitchen, their voices low, the numbers they kept saying not meaning much to me except that the tone of them meant something was wrong.
My mother’s voice stayed even the entire time. Not falsely bright, not performing calmly. Just even, the way a road stays level even when the terrain underneath it is difficult.
The next morning, she made pancakes and let Lena put too many blueberries in hers and didn’t say a word about the roof or the money or any of it. She just made breakfast and asked us about our dreams.
I understood years later that she had spent the entire night awake.
“My mother used to say that having children was the only decision she’d ever made that she couldn’t prepare for,” I tell Zane.
“She spent nine months reading everything she could find and still felt completely unprepared the first time she held me. Said it was like being handed something you’d been waiting for your whole life and suddenly understanding you had no idea what waiting actually meant until that moment. ”
He looks at me across the table. “She sounds like she was someone worth knowing.”
“She was.” I look at my plate for a moment. “She would have been very good at the grandmother part. She would have driven us completely insane, and we would have been grateful for every second of it.”
The kitchen holds that quietly.
“Tell me more about her,” he says.
So I do. I tell him about the soap she bought in bulk from the store on Mercer, the same bottle I’ve been buying ever since, without checking the label.
I tell him about the shoebox of drawings she kept under the bed, every terrible crayon rendition Lena and I ever produced, saved with the same care she gave the mortgage papers.
I tell him about the pancakes, about her voice staying even in the kitchen that night, about the way the house still smells like both of them somehow, years after they’re gone, the way houses hold people long after the people themselves have left.
I tell him about the summer I was eleven and decided I wanted to learn to cook properly, the way adults cooked, and my mother sat with me at the kitchen table every Saturday morning for three months, going through a cookbook she’d had since before I was born, the pages soft and annotated in her handwriting.
I burned things constantly. She never once suggested I stop.
She just adjusted the temperature and told me to try again.
I tell him about the way she laughed, sudden and loud and completely unguarded, the laugh that Lena inherited entirely and that I only ever catch glimpses of in myself.
I talk for longer than I’ve talked about them in years, and he listens the way he listens to things that matter, without interrupting, without filling the pauses, his fork forgotten on his plate.
By the time I finish, the kitchen has gone dark outside the window, and neither of us has moved to turn on more lights.
“That’s the most you’ve ever told me about yourself,” he says.
“I know.”
“I’d like more of that. When you’re ready.”
I look at him across the table, this man who reviewed a file about my life for months before he ever met me, and still didn’t know the most important parts of it.
“There’s a lot you don’t have in any file,” I say.
“I’m aware of that now,” he says. “More than you probably expect me to be.”
Later, I’m in my room reading when I notice the thing on my nightstand that wasn’t there this morning.
A small jar of the expensive hand cream I mentioned to Lena in a video call two weeks ago, offhand, barely a sentence, saying I’d been meaning to order it. I didn’t order it. I forgot about it entirely by the next day.
He was apparently within earshot of that call.
I sit on the edge of the bed and look at the jar for a long time.
It isn’t a grand gesture. It isn’t flowers or jewelry or anything that announces itself.
It’s a man who heard a woman mention something she wanted and quietly made sure it appeared.
No fanfare. No acknowledgment. Just a thing that needed doing, done, the way he does everything that actually matters to him.
I think about my mother’s even voice in the kitchen at midnight. About steadiness being something you build on top of fear rather than something that replaces it.
I think about the man down the corridor who admitted at dinner tonight that the part he cannot manage is the part that terrifies him most, and who said it plainly, without dressing it up, because he has learned somewhere in the last several months that honesty costs less than the alternative.
I put the cream on the nightstand where he left it, turn off the lamp, and lie back in the dark.