Chapter 32
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— Holden —
T he group text came at two in the morning. I was awake although I had been sleeping through most nights for a while now — Pete called it progress; I called it not drinking.
Colt. She’s in labor.
My phone lit up with replies before I’d finished reading. I pulled on my boots and grabbed my keys.
The waiting room was already half-full when I arrived.
Dutch and Indira in the corner, talking low.
Glitch on his phone, laptop by his side.
A handful of old ladies clustered near the vending machine, some excited, some just quiet.
Brothers stood around or sat wherever they’d landed — the kind of organized chaos that happened when the whole club showed up somewhere at once.
Handful came through the doors carrying a tray of coffees, handing them out to anyone in reach. He had his book tucked under his arm — the betting book, the one he kept for everything from poker nights to football season. He set the coffees down and flipped it open.
“Final call,” he said, keeping his voice low enough for a hospital but loud enough to carry. “Who had tonight for the due date? Glitch, that’s you. Don’t spend it all at once.” He ran his finger down the page. “Last chance on names, weight, sex — anyone want in before it’s too late?”
“Do they even know the sex?” Indira asked.
“Lilac said she wanted to be surprised. Colt agreed, and then bought four of everything — two in pink, two in blue.” Handful grinned. “The nursery looks like a baby store exploded.”
Dutch shook his head. “He’s going to be busy returning a lot of baby shit tomorrow.”
“Or,” Handful said, “they get busy and make another set of twins, and then nothing goes to waste.”
Indira threw a balled-up napkin at him. He caught it without looking.
“I’ve got three-to-one on two boys, five-to-one on two girls, even money on one of each. Last chance.”
“One of each,” Dutch said.
Handful wrote it down with the seriousness of a man conducting important business.
I found a chair in the corner and sat.
Betty arrived forty minutes later with Luca and Knox. The whole room went tense when they walked in. We thought they’d be at home until breakfast but apparently Colt had called Betty and said to bring them now, and nobody knew what that meant.
“Calm down, all of you,” Betty said before anyone could ask. She had a bag over one shoulder, packed with everything — juice boxes, granola bars, a deck of cards, coloring books, crayons. “It’s twins. A second set. They’re coming fast, that’s all. Lilac’s doing fine.”
The room exhaled.
Knox and Luca flanked her, both in matching Best Big Brother t-shirts that someone — Lilac, probably — had bought for exactly this occasion. Knox’s was on backwards. Neither of them had noticed.
Betty guided the boys to seats, set the bag down, and started unpacking like she was setting up camp.
Knox was wide-eyed but buzzing, the kind of nervous energy that came out as movement — his legs swinging, his head turning to take in every corner of the waiting room.
Luca was quieter, his face serious, watching the doors that led deeper into the hospital like he could see through them to wherever his mother was.
“Is Mama okay?” Luca asked Betty. His voice was steady but his hands weren’t.
Betty crouched down to his level. “Your mama is tough as nails and she’s done this before with you two. The doctors are with her and your daddy’s right there holding her hand. She’s going to be just fine.”
Luca nodded once. Then he went and stood at the window and didn’t say anything else.
Knox found me and came to sit beside me without explanation, the way he always did — just placed himself there.
“He’s worried,” Knox said quietly.
“Yeah.”
“He won’t say so.”
“No.” I looked at Luca’s back, the rigid set of eight-year-old shoulders. “He never does.”
Knox considered that. Then he got up and went to stand beside his brother at the window. Luca didn’t acknowledge him. But his shoulders dropped half an inch.
Handful watched them for a moment, then pulled the deck of cards from Betty’s bag and wandered over. “Hey. Either of you two want to see something?” He fanned the cards in one hand — smooth, practiced, the same tricks he’d used to win them over the first time. “Pick a card. Don’t show me.”
Knox turned immediately. Luca held out a moment longer, but curiosity won. He turned from the window and watched Handful’s hands.
Handful made the wrong card appear three times before producing the right one from behind Knox’s ear. Both boys laughed — Knox loud, Luca quiet — and for a few minutes the hospital waiting room was just a place where a man was doing card tricks for two kids.
Bea arrived shortly after.
I didn’t hear her come in. I just looked up and she was there—in the doorway, coat on, hair loose like she’d left in a hurry.
She scanned the room and found Indira first, who stood and crossed to her quickly, and they held each other for a moment the way women do when they’ve been carrying something together.
Then Bea looked up and found me. One second. Two. She nodded. I nodded back.
She went and sat with Indira. I stayed in my corner. The room was big enough that this was easy. We were both here for the same reason and that was all it needed to be.
I was working on accepting that. Most days I was better at it than others.
The nurse came out at 3:37. She looked around the waiting room, eyes going wide at the sheer number of people. “Who’s here for the Spencers?”
Every person in the room either stood up, raised a hand, or said “yes” at the same time.
The nurse blinked. “Right. Well.” She recovered quickly.
“Two boys. Mom and babies are all doing well. Everyone’s healthy.
Identical, like the first set.” Her eyes moved around the room and landed on Luca and Knox. “Just like you two.”
The room erupted. Whoever had two boys in Handful’s book let out a holler that bounced off every wall in the corridor. Handful was already flipping pages, muttering about payouts.
Someone near the back said, low, “Which side of the family do the twins come from?”
The nurse glanced over. “Doesn’t work that way with identical. It’s random — a fluke. Not something that gets passed down.”
“Weights?” Betty called out, because of course she did.
“Five pounds two ounces and four pounds thirteen,” the nurse said, smiling now. “Good size for twins.”
Handful was still working through the book, but his hands weren’t steady. Glitch caught my eye across the room and nodded once — the most emotion I’d ever seen from him. Dutch let out a slow breath through his nose and sat back down.
Luca and Knox looked at each other. Knox reached over and grabbed Luca’s wrist and held on. Betty put her hands on their shoulders from behind—one on each—and I watched something settle in both boys at the news they had two baby brothers. Identical, just like them.
They let us in a few at a time.
Betty took the boys in first — Luca’s urgent, forward-leaning stride, Knox hanging back just far enough to let his brother be first, Betty behind them both with a hand on each back. They didn’t come out. Then Dutch and Indira. Then the others, a few at a time.
Bea went ahead of me. I watched her disappear through the door and heard Lilac’s voice, soft with exhaustion, and then Bea’s answering it, and I stayed in the hallway a moment longer than I needed to.
When I went in, the room was warm and bright and full of people who loved each other.
Colt was holding a baby. A small, wrinkled, entirely unimpressive human being wrapped in a hospital blanket, and Colt looking down at him with an expression I’d never seen on him before.
He’d missed this with Knox and Luca — hadn’t known they existed until they were six.
This was his first time holding a child that was minutes old.
Lilac had the other against her chest. She looked wrecked and radiant — like she hadn’t slept in a year and didn’t care.
Knox had climbed up beside her, careful, one hand on the edge of the blanket. Luca stood at Colt’s elbow, staring at the baby Colt held with the focused attention of a child making a very serious assessment.
“Is he okay?” Luca asked.
“He’s perfect,” Colt said.
Luca considered this. “He looks like a potato.”
“Luca.” Knox, without looking up.
“He does.”
Colt’s mouth did something that was almost a smile. “You looked just like this when you were born.”
“I did not,” Luca said, with complete certainty.
Betty was beside Lilac, smoothing her hair back from her forehead. She said something too quiet for me to hear, and Lilac’s eyes filled. She didn’t try to stop it.
I stood at the back of the room and watched all of this. Most of the others had cycled through already — it was just the family now. Colt, Lilac, Betty, the boys.
And Bea. Still there, at Lilac’s other side. Lilac shifted and held the baby out to her, and Bea took him — careful, natural, with the confidence of a woman who has held babies before and isn’t afraid of them.
I thought of her apartment. Her voice, raw and wrecked, the night I’d gone to tell her the truth. I used to think about it. A little boy with your jaw and your serious face. A little girl with my hair. I’d already rearranged the furniture for children we hadn’t made yet.
She was holding someone else’s baby in a hospital room at four in the morning, and I wanted her so badly I couldn’t breathe.
I wanted to be the man standing next to her.
I wanted to be the reason she was holding a child.
I wanted everything Colt had in this room — the exhausted wife, the boys crowded around her, the new life in his arms.
But I wasn’t there yet. I knew it the way I knew the sobriety was real — not because someone had told me, but because I could feel the distance between where I was and where I needed to be. I was closer than I’d been six months ago. But closer wasn’t there.
I stayed long enough to see it. Then I stepped back into the hallway and let them have it.
The waiting room was still full. Brothers sprawled across chairs, old ladies dozing, Handful dealing a quiet hand of cards with whoever was still awake. Nobody had left. The whole club, still here at four in the morning, waiting.
Betty came out with the boys a while later — Knox half-asleep on his feet, leaning into her side, Luca following with his hand in hers, too tired to pretend he didn’t need it. She paused and looked back toward the room.
“You did good,” she said. To no one in particular. To all of it. Then she took the boys home.
Bea came through the doors next. She looked at me across the waiting room. Not the careful nod from earlier. A look that held longer than that. Then she was gone.
Colt came through the double doors. The room went quiet. “We named them,” he said.
I waited.
“Graham.” He looked down. “And Danny.”
Nobody spoke. The whole room held it — a dead prospect’s name given to a new life. Another name carried forward from a different darkness, older, from before Colt and I were brothers.
“Graham and Danny,” Colt said again, quieter. Then he turned and went back through the doors to his wife and his new sons.
The room was quiet. Then Handful flipped to the back of his book, ran his finger down the page, and looked up.
“House wins,” he said. “Nobody had Graham and Danny.”
A few brothers laughed. I did too. It was the right sound for that room at that hour — not disrespectful, just alive.