Elena #2
For one breath, I don't understand what it is.
Everything keeps moving. Danielle speaks. Someone adjusts the bed. Dominic's fingers close hard around mine.
Then our baby is lifted into view.
“Oh my God.”
My voice breaks.
The baby is placed against my chest, warm and damp and impossibly small. A tiny mouth opens against my skin. One fist presses beneath a round cheek.
“Hi,” I whisper.
My hand trembles when I touch that soft head, the fine hair like silk beneath my fingertips.
“Hi, baby. We’ve been waiting for you.”
I look at Dominic.
He hasn't moved.
One hand grips the bed rail. His eyes are fixed on the baby, and every trace of control has disappeared from his face. He looks stunned and terrified. His eyes fill before he even blinks.
“Dominic.”
He looks at me.
“Come here.”
He bends over us. His hand hovers several inches above the baby's back as if he's afraid the wrong touch could hurt something this small.
“You can touch.”
His palm settles carefully over our child.
The breath leaves him in a broken rush.
“Elena.”
That’s all he can say, but his voice holds everything. All the fear, all the love he couldn’t name for years.
“I know.” I say it the way I couldn’t in my kitchen months ago—not as a deflection, but as an answer.
He presses his forehead to mine. Tears run down his face as he looks between me and the baby.
This is the man who offered to give me a child before he understood why the thought of another man doing it made him furious.
He showed up early to every appointment with a notebook.
He learned which questions were useful and which ones came from fear.
He cleared his calendar, turned off his phone, and stayed beside me while I squeezed his hand hard enough that he may never regain full circulation.
He wanted this long before he could admit he wanted me too.
His voice cracks. “You did it.”
“We did.”
“You did more.”
“Significantly.”
A wet laugh escapes him. “Significantly more.”
The nurse eventually asks whether he wants to hold the baby.
He looks at me before he answers, his own desperate longing held in check. “Are you ready for me to?”
My throat closes. It’s such a simple question, but it’s the entire point. He isn’t assuming. He isn’t taking. Even now, when he wants this so badly he can barely speak, he asks me.
“Yes.”
He sits in the chair beside the bed and holds out his arms. For once, Dominic Rowe holds out his arms, uncertain.
The nurse helps settle the baby against his chest.
He goes still again.
“Support the head,” I murmur.
“I am.”
“You look worried.”
“I'm holding an entire person.”
“A very small one.”
“That makes it worse.”
His thumb moves carefully over the blanket. The baby squirms once, then settles against him.
Dominic stares down at that tiny face. When he looks at me, his mouth opens, but no words form. It’s not that he has nothing to say; it’s that there are no words big enough for what he’s feeling.
I don't make him try.
For several minutes, the world belongs only to us.
There are people waiting for news. Cliff and Rachel. Sophie and Theo. Maya, Evan, Olivia, and everyone else who has watched us make a complete disaster of finding our way here.
They can wait.
When the baby is back in my arms, Dominic sits beside me on the bed and takes out his phone. We choose a picture together. He sends it first to Cliff and Rachel, then to Maya, Evan, Olivia, and the rest of our family.
Replies begin arriving before he can put the phone down.
Dominic reads the first message from Cliff, and his eyes well up again.
“What did he say?”
“He said congratulations.” His voice roughens. “And that we should call when we're ready.”
I lean against Dominic's shoulder. “Not yet.”
“No.”
He turns the phone face down and wraps his arm around us.
Hours later, the room is quiet enough that I can hear Dominic breathing.
He sits in the chair beside my bed with our sleeping newborn against his chest. His shirt is wrinkled. His hair is out of place where he’s dragged his fingers through it, and the exhaustion around his eyes makes him look closer to his actual age.
Maybe older.
My voice is low. “You can put the baby in the bassinet.”
“I know.”
“You could also sleep.”
“So could you.”
“I would if you stopped staring at me every thirty seconds.”
“I'm checking on you.”
“You've asked five nurses whether I'm all right.”
“Six.”
“Of course you counted.”
“The next one will be here in seventeen minutes.”
I smile. “Are you managing?”
“Poorly.”
The honesty is so immediate, so unadorned, that it feels more intimate than any practiced reassurance would.
The honesty undoes me.
I reach toward the water on the table. Dominic passes it to me without standing or shifting the baby.
“Thank you.”
He watches until I finish drinking, then looks down again.
“I thought I knew what this would feel like,” he says.
“And?”
“I was wrong.”
“That must be difficult for you.”
“Devastating.”
I hand him the cup. “I won't tell anyone.”
His thumb rubs slowly over the blanket covering our baby's back.
“All my life, I’ve been building things,” he says. “The company, the portfolio... always moving to the next goal. I thought standing still was wasting time.”
“You're terrible at standing still.”
“I've noticed.”
He looks at me.
“Nothing I built before the two of you matters more than this.”
A breath catches in my chest. There was a time when I would’ve taken that sentence apart. I would’ve tried to measure it, define it, and identify every circumstance that might prove it false.
I don’t do that now.
Dominic withdrew from the Weller deal before he knew whether I would come home. He flew to Colorado knowing I might refuse to see him. He stayed when I admitted I'd let fear make my decisions. He told Cliff the truth, accepted his anger, and didn't ask me to make the conversation easier for him.
He keeps choosing me when the choice is uncomfortable and when the choice promises him nothing.
I believe him.
The binder I carried into my office on my thirtieth birthday held a plan for having a child alone. Every tab gave me another decision I could make without trusting anyone else.
Then Dominic found it, and we wrote a contract that tried to account for every possible risk except falling in love.
I wanted a predictable outcome.
Our child is asleep on Dominic's chest, one tiny fist tucked beneath a chin I can't stop staring at.
“I'm glad you found the binder,” I say.
His eyes meet mine. “So am I.”
I smile faintly. “You were unbearably arrogant about it.”
“I was offering a superior solution.”
A corner of his mouth ticks up, the tell I’ve come to know so well. “You were jealous of donor profiles.”
“I found them surprisingly irritating.”
A laugh escapes me before I wince.
Dominic leans forward. “Are you all right?”
“I gave birth today. Stop asking that like there's a reasonable answer.”
He settles back, chastened for approximately two seconds.
The baby makes a soft noise. Dominic lowers his head immediately, whispering something I can't hear.
“What did you say?”
“That daddy’s here.”
My eyes burn.
I hold my hand out to him.
He rises carefully and comes to the bed. Once he sits beside me, I shift to settle our baby between us and curl my fingers into the front of his wrinkled shirt.
Dominic's arm closes around my shoulders.
“I love you,” he says against my hair.
“I love you too.”
Our child stretches, then settles when Dominic places his hand over that tiny back.
I cover his hand with mine and lean into him.
He kisses my temple.
“Elena.”
“Mm?”
“We haven't named her.”
I go still.
He feels it. “What?”
“A name.” My voice comes out too high. “Dominic, we don't have a name. I had a spreadsheet. I had a system. There were categories and weighted scores and I was going to decide by week thirty-two, and then the Weller situation happened, and the merger, and you, and I just—” I look down at our daughter, her face squashed against his chest, completely unconcerned.
“Okay.”
“Okay? I forgot to name our child. That's not okay. That's a catastrophic planning failure.”
“Elena.” He catches my chin, turns my face toward his. “She's three hours old. I think we have time.”
“What if I pick wrong? What if I give her a name that doesn't fit, and she's stuck with it because I was too distracted by—” I gesture vaguely at him, at us, at everything. “This.”
Dominic looks at me for a long moment. Then he shifts our daughter in his arms, supporting her head the way the nurse showed him, and touches one fingertip to her palm. Her fingers curl around it.
“She's going to be fierce,” he says quietly. “Independent. The kind of person who doesn't apologize for wanting things.”
“Like her mother.”
“Like her mother.” He traces the line of her cheek. “She's going to argue with us. She's going to make decisions we don't agree with. She's going to fall in love with someone who complicates her entire life, and she's going to fight for it anyway because that's what Rowe women do.”
My throat tightens. “Dominic.”
“The name doesn't make her that, Elena. She already is.” He looks at me, and his expression is so open it feels like looking at the sun. “Whatever we call her, she's going to be extraordinary. You made sure of that before she was born.”
I swallow. “Emilia,” I say. “It was always at the top of the list. It means 'rival.' It felt... appropriate.”
“Emilia.” He tries it out, watching her face. “Emilia Rowe.”
“And Grace. For my mother.”
His eyes meet mine. “Emilia Grace Rowe.”
I take her from him, settle her against my chest. Her weight is impossibly light. “Hi, Emilia,” I whisper. “I'm your mama. I planned for everything except how much I would love you. It was the one thing I couldn't plan for.”
Dominic's arm tightens around me.
Together, we hold our daughter.