Epilogue — Six Months Later
Our daughter is three weeks old and Declan Maguire has not slept since she arrived.
I'm not exaggerating. I'm not being dramatic.
The man has not slept. He dozes — I've caught him dozing in the nursery chair at four AM with Claire on his chest, his eyes closed for maybe twenty minutes before they snap open and he does a full perimeter check of a sleeping infant like she might have developed an escape plan while he blinked.
I found him at two this morning in the nursery.
The room that used to be his office, the room where I stood in the doorway holding a pregnancy test approximately a thousand years ago.
He was in the chair with Claire on his chest, both hands on her, his eyes open in the dark. Just watching her breathe.
I leaned in the doorway and watched him watch her and I thought: this is the most Declan Maguire thing that has ever happened.
The man who counted my freckles at two AM has found a new subject.
She weighs seven pounds. She has his jaw and my freckles and his dark eyes and my hair, or what there is of it — reddish, fine, sticking up in ways that no amount of smoothing is going to fix.
She is three weeks old and she already looks like a person who will have opinions.
She gets that from me. He gets no credit for the opinions.
We named her Claire.
My dad cried. Declan held my hand. I held the baby.
The three of us in a hospital room with my mom's name on the bracelet and nobody saying anything because there was nothing to say that the name didn't already say.
My dad touched the bracelet and looked at me and his face did something I'm going to carry for the rest of my life.
Not sadness. Not exactly. The face of a man seeing his wife's name on his granddaughter's wrist and understanding that the world keeps going in ways he didn't plan for and that some of them are good.
Sunday dinner. Our house. Lakeview Drive.
I'm making dinner, which is an ambitious word for what I'm doing.
Declan offered to cook and I told him no because this is my house and my kitchen and my dad is coming for the first time and I want to be the one standing at the stove when he walks in.
This would be a more powerful statement if I weren't currently googling "how to tell if chicken is done" on my phone while stirring something that may or may not be gravy.
Claire is in her bouncer on the counter, watching me cook with the expression of someone who has serious doubts about the proceedings. She gets that from Declan.
My dad's car pulls into the driveway at five.
I watch from the kitchen window. He gets out and stands there for a moment the way Declan stands in driveways — collecting himself, settling his face, getting ready for something that requires more of him than the drive did. Then he comes to the door.
Declan opens it.
I stay in the kitchen. This is their moment. Whatever passes between two men who've been each other's constants for thirty years and who are now something different and not yet sure what — that happens at the door. Without me. Without an audience.
I hear my dad's voice. Low. Something I can't make out.
Then Declan's. Lower. Something I also can't make out but that sounds, from the cadence of it, like two men saying things they've practiced in the car and that come out differently in person.
Then my dad is in the kitchen and he's looking at me and Claire is on the counter and his whole face changes.
Everything that's been hard and hurt between us doesn't disappear.
It just moves to the side, temporarily, because there is a baby on the counter and the baby is his granddaughter and she's wearing a onesie that says "I get my looks from my grandpa" which I bought specifically for today because I am petty and strategic and I know my audience.
"Oh, Billie," he says.
"I know," I say.
"The onesie."
"I know."
He picks her up. Takes her with the practice of a man who held two babies of his own and hasn't forgotten. She settles against his chest like she's been waiting for this specific chest her whole three-week life. Her eyes close. Her hand curls against his collar.
My dad looks down at her and his face does the thing that breaks me every time, which is the thing where a man holds a second chance he didn't know he was getting and tries not to cry about it in front of his daughter.
"She looks like your mother," he says. His voice is rough.
"She looks like Declan," I say.
"She looks like both." He adjusts her. His hand on the back of her head, enormous and careful. "She looks like all of you."
I almost lose it. Almost. I hold it together because the gravy needs stirring and because I've already cried twice today and because if I start now I won't stop and then nobody eats and the chicken is questionable enough as it is.
After dinner. Which was fine. The chicken was done. The gravy was acceptable. Nobody commented on the gravy, which I'm choosing to interpret as approval.
The back porch. Declan and my dad. Two beers. The chairs angled toward the yard, the way men sit when they're going to talk about something or not talk about something and either way the yard needs to be looked at.
I watch from the kitchen window. Claire asleep on my chest. Her weight, which is nothing and everything.
The impossible smallness of her hand curled against my collarbone.
She smells like baby shampoo and milk and something underneath both that is just her, just Claire, and I press my nose against the top of her head and breathe.
They don't talk much. My dad says something. Declan nods. Silence. My dad drinks his beer. Declan drinks his. More silence. The yard going dark around them.
The silence between them is damaged and careful and present. Not the easy warmth of thirty years. Not restored. Something new. Something that's going to take a long time and that neither of them is rushing because they've both learned, the hard way, what rushing costs.
Not restored. But alive.
I'm not going to pretend it's more than it is. Anything warmer than this would be a lie and we are done lying in this family.
Declan's eyes find mine through the kitchen glass.
Before I've been standing there five seconds.
Before I've made a sound or moved or done anything to announce myself.
His eyes lift from the yard to the window to my face and he finds me the way he has always found me — immediately, completely, without effort.
As if some part of him is always turned in my direction, scanning, waiting to know where I am.
Of course they do. They always do.
I stand in my kitchen with my daughter on my chest and my dad on the porch and Declan on the porch and I look at the life I built.
My dad is on that porch and Declan is on that porch and neither of them is easy and both of them are mine and I built this. Not BrattyBaby. Not Ronan's good girl. Just me. Billie Callaghan who counted on being seen and was.