Chapter 40 Zatanna
ZATANNA
The first time I hold him without wires in the way, I cry so hard a nurse has to hand me tissues and pretend not to notice.
He’s so small. Not fragile exactly. He’s stronger than he looks, which I’m already told is “a good sign” in the calm, practiced voices hospital staff use when they’ve seen too much and learned how to package fear into manageable shapes.
But still. He fits against my chest like he was carved out of all the empty space I’d been carrying for months.
Our son. I still trip over that in my head sometimes.
Not because I doubt it anymore. That part is done. Burned away. Aleksei knows. I know he knows. And somehow the world did not stop when the truth finally stood up in the room.
It just got real.
A few days later, we take him home.
Home is a strange word for Aleksei’s house. It’s too big, too quiet, too expensive to feel like mine, but as I watch the nurse carefully settle our son into the car seat and Aleksei stand there looking like he’d personally fight gravity if it made the baby safer, the word starts to shift.
Maybe not mine. Maybe not yet.
But ours, in some new frightening way.
The ride back is absurdly tense for people bringing home a sleeping newborn.
I keep leaning over every few minutes just to check if he’s breathing.
Aleksei keeps telling the driver to slow down at corners and then glaring at me when I try to adjust the baby blanket without unbuckling.
“We are both being insane,” I whisper.
“Yes,” he says, eyes still on the baby. “But I’m doing it correctly.”
I should be offended. Instead, I laugh.
It feels strange. Good strange. Thin with exhaustion, but real.
By the time we pull into the drive, the house staff is lined up with the kind of discreet excitement rich houses probably manufacture for occasions like this.
Someone has put flowers in the foyer. Someone else has clearly aired out the nursery three more times than necessary. Aleksei’s mother is not there.
That absence sits in the house like a bruise.
No one says her name. No one needs to.
We go upstairs slowly. Everything is slow now. Every movement. Every decision. The baby wakes once and makes one small, offended sound, and both of us freeze like a bomb just ticked louder.
I take him from the car seat and he settles again against me, warm and impossibly trusting.
Aleksei watches us. That look on his face is going to ruin my life if I’m not careful.
It’s softer now. Not weaker. Just open in places that used to stay locked.
He watches me like he still can’t believe we both made it here.
Me, alive. The baby, alive. All of us under one roof without monitors and nurses and the constant fear that the next person through the door will bring worse news.
The first day home blurs into all the things no one tells you are ninety percent of having a newborn.
Feeding. Burping. Changing. Feeding again.
Staring in alarm at normal noises. Staring in alarm at silence.
Arguing softly over whether he feels too warm or too cool.
Napping in twenty-minute slices that feel like being hit over the head with mercy.
By evening, I am standing at the nursery window with the baby asleep on my shoulder, swaying in place because apparently that’s just what my body does now, when I hear footsteps behind me.
Aleksei. Of course.
He comes in quietly and stops beside me. “He’s asleep?” he whispers.
I glance down at our son, his tiny mouth parted, one fist curled under his chin. “For now.”
Aleksei leans in to look, and for a second the three of us are reflected in the nursery glass. It hits me then.
Not in some grand romantic swell. In a very practical, terrifying, intimate way.
This is a family.
Not neat. Not normal. Not stable in the way guidebooks would recommend.
But real.
I lower the baby into the bassinet as carefully as if the floor might shake, then turn and find Aleksei still watching me. “What?” I whisper.
He doesn’t answer right away. That should have warned me.
Instead, I just stand there in my milk-stained robe and borrowed slippers and wait.
Then he says, very quietly, “Marry me.”
I blink. No. Surely no.
I stare at him to make sure the sleep deprivation hasn’t finally snapped the last thread of my mind.
He is completely serious.
I let out one small, disbelieving laugh. “What?”
“Marry me,” he repeats. Like saying it twice makes it less insane.
I look around the nursery as if maybe there’s another woman in here he could possibly be talking to. “Aleksei.”
He takes a step closer. He looks tired. More tired than I’ve ever seen him. There are shadows under his eyes, his shirt is wrinkled, and he has a line between his brows that only appears when he is trying very hard not to force the world into doing what he wants.
Which means he has thought about this. That is somehow worse.
“I know the timing is bad,” he says.
I almost laugh again because that is the understatement of the century.
The timing isn’t bad. The timing is deranged.
We have just brought home a newborn. I still walk like I lost an argument with a truck.
His mother tried to kill me. The city is probably still bleeding around whatever war he’s fighting.
And he wants to propose now.
“Bad?” I whisper. “That’s the word you picked?”
The corner of his mouth almost moves. “I’m trying to stay calm.”
That helps and does not help.
He reaches into his pocket.
My stomach drops. The ring.
He doesn’t get on one knee. Thank God, because if he did, I might actually leave my body from the sheer overload of it. He just opens the box and holds it there between us.
My chest tightens.
“I brought this once before,” he says.
I know.
“I shouldn’t have waited.”
“Aleksei…”
“I love you.” His voice stays level, but there’s too much in it to mistake. “I love our son. I want this made formal, protected, unquestionable. I want you under my name where no one gets to treat you like a mistake.”
God. That goes straight through me.
Because that’s the thing. It isn’t just a proposal. Not for him. It’s love, yes, but it’s also safety. Legitimacy. A shield. A promise. A claim. Everything he knows how to give all tied together in one unbearable offer.
And some huge, aching part of me wants to say yes.
Wants it so badly it almost hurts. But wanting is not the same as being ready.
I look at him. At the ring. At his face.
At the man who would absolutely build a fortress around me if I let him and call it devotion.
And I know, with painful clarity, that if I say yes right now, I will never know whether I chose it freely or because I’m too exhausted and scared and in love to separate those things.
So I shake my head.
His whole body stills.
Not angry. Just braced.
“I can’t,” I say softly. The words hurt coming out.
His face doesn’t change much, but I know him well enough now to see the impact anyway. A slight tightening of the jaw. The way his grip on the ring box firms just a fraction.
I step closer before that silence can turn into damage. “It’s not ‘no’ forever,” I say quickly. “It’s ‘no’ now.”
He says nothing.
So, I keep going, because he deserves the truth and because I owe this to myself too. “I love you,” I tell him. “I do. And I love this baby, and I know what we are, or at least I know enough of it to say that part out loud now.”
His eyes stay locked on mine.
“But I just almost died,” I say. “I gave birth early. I’m standing in your house holding together by tape and hormones and blind optimism.
You’re in the middle of a war. I am still learning how not to panic every time I close my eyes.
And if I marry you now, I will always wonder whether I chose it because I was ready… ”
I take a breath. “Or because I was scared to lose you.”
He looks down at the ring once, then closes the box slowly. When he speaks, his voice is quieter. “You think I’m rushing you.”
“Yes.”
He nods once. “That’s fair.”
The simple acceptance of it almost undoes me worse than if he’d argued.
I look at the closed ring box in his hand, then away.
There it is again. That old, ugly feeling. Not loud, but familiar. The one that whispers that people like him do not marry women like me. That sooner or later, no matter what he says, I become the story they tell about his bad judgment. The girl from the recordings. The scandal. The mistake.
He must see it on my face, because his expression changes. “What is it?” he asks.
I shake my head once. “Nothing.”
“Zatanna.”
His voice is too steady for me to dodge.
I let out a breath. “It’s stupid.”
“Tell me anyway.”
I look up at him. “It’s just...” I hesitate, then force it out. “I know how people see me. Or how they think they do. Your office. Your mother. Alena. All of them had some version of what I was supposed to be.”
His face hardens immediately at the mention of his mother, but I keep going.
“And I know you say it doesn’t matter. But sometimes I still feel it. Like if I stand next to you long enough, people will always look at me and think I don’t belong there.”
His jaw tightens. “That’s not because it’s true.”
“I know,” I say quickly. Then, more firmly, because I need to hear myself say it too, “And I’m not going to let what your mother said get into my head. I won’t. Because it wasn’t true.”
Something in his face softens.
“She wanted me ashamed,” I say. “She wanted me small. She wanted me to believe that if you loved me, it made you weak, and if I loved you, it made me cheap.”
His voice comes out pained, as he shakes his head. “No. I’m done doing her work for her. No mother would do what she did. She’s no worse than my father.”
“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” I say. “I have my share of shitty parents. The money you sent me as a bonus went to my mother and she never even said thank you.”
He looks at me for a long second, then reaches up and touches my face. “You’re here, that’s good enough for me,” he says quietly.