Chapter Twenty-Seven
Wren let me take Theo alone for the first time on a Saturday morning, no supervision, no timer, just the two of us and a diaper bag she’d packed with a level of detail that told me she’d spent all week deciding whether to trust me with it.
“Two hours,” she said, at the door. “The pediatrician’s line is on speed dial if you need it. You don’t need it. You know what you’re doing.”
“I know what I’m doing medically,” I said. “I’m still learning what I’m doing as his father.”
?
We went to the park near my mother’s, and I sat on a bench with him strapped to my chest, and for two hours nothing happened that was worth telling anyone about.
He slept. He woke and studied a tree with the fierce concentration he apparently inherited from his mother.
He cried for four minutes over nothing I could identify, and then stopped, for reasons I also couldn’t identify.
It was the least eventful two hours of the entire story, and it was the best two hours I’d had since March.
?
I texted Wren a single photo at the end of it: Theo asleep against my chest, my hand splayed protectively across his back.
She didn’t write anything back for twenty minutes. Then: He looks like you when he sleeps. I never noticed before.
I sat with that for a long time before I trusted myself to answer it.