41. Celine
CELINE
The nursery is almost finished.
I’m sitting on the floor of the room that used to be a guest space, surrounded by half-assembled shelving and a stack of small folded clothes Lena sent from a shop in Zurich she swears is the only place worth buying baby clothes from, and I’m trying to decide where the rocking chair should go.
By the window, probably. Somewhere with light.
Zane is supposed to be helping with the shelving. He’s been on the phone in the doorway for ten minutes instead, something with Alexei about a routine matter, and I’ve given up waiting and started organizing the clothes myself, tiny things that don’t seem real yet even now, this close to the end.
“Sorry,” he says, finally off the phone, crouching down beside me. “Alexei wanted to confirm the spring council calendar.”
“Did you tell him I’m thirty-seven weeks pregnant and currently more interested in shelving than calendars?”
“I told him it could wait.”
He picks up the instructions for the shelf, frowns at them the way he frowns at documents that don’t make immediate sense to him, and I laugh despite myself, watching a man who can dismantle a rival organization in four days struggle with a furniture diagram.
“We still haven’t decided on a name,” I say, watching him work.
“I have a short list.”
“You said that two weeks ago.”
“I’m narrowing it.”
“Narrow faster. Henrik keeps asking.”
He smiles at that, real and unguarded, the kind of smile I’ve only started seeing from him in the last few months, and for a moment the room feels exactly like what it’s supposed to be.
Ordinary. A couple assembling furniture, bickering gently about names, waiting for their daughter to arrive on schedule.
I don’t yet know whether the schedule is about to become irrelevant.
It starts just after midnight.
I wake up because something feels different, low and tight across my stomach, and my first instinct is to dismiss it the way I’ve dismissed most physical sensations for months now, certain it’s nothing, certain my body is simply doing what pregnant bodies do this close to the end.
I lie still in the dark and wait for it to pass.
It passes. Then it comes back, twenty minutes later, sharper this time.
I tell myself it’s Braxton Hicks. I’ve read about this.
False labor is common, nothing to worry about, and it’s three weeks early too early for anything else to make sense.
I get up and walk to the kitchen for water, the way every article I’ve read suggests, and I stand at the counter in the dark waiting for the tightening to ease.
It doesn’t ease.
By one in the morning, I’ve stopped pretending. The tightening is coming at intervals I can actually time now, close enough together that even my determined skepticism can’t argue with the pattern anymore.
I stand in the kitchen with my phone in my hand, the timer app open, watching the numbers confirm what my body already knows.
I go to find him.
He’s awake before I finish saying his name.
“What’s wrong?”
“I think it’s starting.”
He’s out of bed before I finish the sentence, pulling on clothes with the same controlled speed I’ve watched him move with in every crisis since I’ve known him, except this is different from anything operational, his hands not quite as steady as they usually are.
“It’s three weeks early,” I say, the fear finally breaking through the surface I’ve been keeping calm since midnight.
“I know.”
“That’s early enough to be a problem, Zane.”
“I know that too.” He’s beside me now, his hand finding mine, his voice steady even though I can see something tighter than usual behind his eyes. “We’re going. Now.”
He gets me to the hospital in under ten minutes.
I don’t ask how. I’m aware, distantly, of the car moving faster than it should through streets that are nearly empty this time of night, of Roman somewhere ahead of us clearing the path, of Zane’s hand never leaving mine the entire way, his thumb moving in slow circles against my knuckles, brushing over my ring in a way I don’t think he’s aware he’s doing.
I watch the city pass through the window, streetlights blurring slightly with how fast we’re moving, and I focus on small things because focusing on small things is the only way I know how to keep from falling apart.
The glow of the traffic lights. The sound of the tires on wet pavement. Zane’s hands on the wheel, steady even now, even with everything happening.
I don’t tell him I’m scared.
I want to. The words sit right at the edge of my throat the entire drive, but saying them feels like it would make the fear more real than it already is, and some old, stubborn part of me still believes that managing my own terror quietly is safer than admitting it out loud.
I grip his hand tighter instead, and he grips back, and I think, somewhere underneath the fear, that he probably already knows anyway.
The hospital moves fast once we arrive. I’m in a room within minutes, monitors attached, a doctor I’ve never met examining me with calm, careful hands while another nurse asks Zane questions he answers without hesitation, every piece of my medical history apparently memorized somewhere in that mind of his that forgets nothing.
“Three weeks early,” the doctor says, reading the monitor. “Active labor, contractions five minutes apart. We’ll need to watch her closely given the timing, but everything I’m seeing right now looks stable.”
“Stable,” I repeat, needing to hear the word again.
“Stable,” she confirms. “Babies born at thirty-seven weeks generally do very well. We’re not in dangerous territory. We’re simply earlier than planned.”
I exhale, the first full breath I’ve taken since midnight.
Zane doesn’t leave the room. Not for a single moment, not when the doctor steps out to consult with her team, not when a nurse asks if he’d like a coffee from the machine down the hall, not even when I tell him, somewhere around three in the morning, that he should at least sit down instead of standing beside the bed the entire time.
“I’m fine standing,” he says.
“You’ve been standing for two hours.”
“I’m fine.”
I don’t argue further.
I understand, somewhere in the part of my mind that isn’t currently consumed with the rhythm of contractions, that standing here beside me is the only thing he can actually do right now, the only contribution available to a man who has spent his entire life solving problems through action and is suddenly faced with something no amount of strategy or resources can speed along or control.
He holds my hand through every contraction.
He doesn’t flinch when my grip tightens hard enough to hurt.
He counts the seconds with me when the doctor asks me to breathe through the worst of it, his voice low and steady in my ear, and somewhere around four in the morning, exhausted and frightened and further into this than I’ve ever been in my life, I understand that whatever this man’s failures have been, this isn’t one of them.
“Talk to me,” I say, between contractions, needing something to focus on besides the pain.
“About what?”
“Anything. The names. Tell me the names.”
He smiles, tired but real. “Not yet. You’ll find out properly when she’s here.”
“Zane.”
“Soon,” he says, and presses a kiss to my temple, and the next contraction takes whatever protest I had left.
The hours blur together after that, pain and breath and Zane’s voice the one constant thread running through all of it, the doctor’s calm updates marking time in a way the clock on the wall no longer seems to.
By five in the morning, the doctor tells me it’s nearly time.
I look at Zane. He looks back at me, something unguarded and entirely undone behind his eyes, every careful control he’s built his whole life around stripped away in this one room, at this one hour, for this one reason.
“Ready,” he says, not a question.
I nod, because I am, because I’ve been building toward this moment since long before I understood I was building toward anything at all, and the room narrows down to nothing but this, the two of us, and our daughter who is finally, after everything, about to arrive.