CHAPTER 2
EVE
Packing two newborns for a trip is not packing. It is a military logistics operation with smaller socks.
I have a spreadsheet. I am not ashamed. Bottles, pump, pump parts, backup pump parts, sterilizer bags, diapers because desert facilities do not stock preemie sizes, the feeding log, the white noise machine, the backup white noise machine, Simon’s special reflux wedge, and Sasha’s scale, because I weigh my daughter every morning and I am not apologizing for that either.
Mason watches me check things off and smiles at me with his whole face. “You know the residence has staff. They can get anything we forget.”
“They cannot get Sasha’s scale calibrated the way I have it calibrated.”
“You’ve calibrated the baby scale?”
“I’ve calibrated the baby scale.”
He puts his hands up in surrender, still smiling, and I remember for the hundredth time why arguing with him is so hard.
He’s not cruel. He’s not careless. He is a man who sincerely believes that love plus money plus staff equals presence, and no amount of my exhaustion has ever fully corrected that.
The pitch, when he made it days ago, was genuinely good.
That is the thing about Mason Tailor: his pitches are always genuinely good.
The thermal problem needs him at the launch facility for at least a week.
He doesn’t want to leave us. The on-site residence has a full staff, a nursery suite, a chef.
We’ll be together. He’ll do evening feeds.
He crossed his heart, in writing this time, on the whiteboard in the kitchen.
“One week,” he’d said. “And when the test is done, I’m taking two full days. No phone. Cross my heart again, preemptively.”
I said yes. Because the alternative was a week alone at home watching him on the news, and because some stupid hopeful part of me still believes the pitch every single time.
The launch facility sits in the desert several hundred miles inland, with white towers and concrete aprons and a rocket on the pad in the distance looking impossibly slender for something with that much explosive in it.
We fly in on the company jet, which never stops being absurd. Simon screams for the entire descent. Sasha sleeps through it, because my daughter’s priorities are and have always been mysterious.
The residence is, as promised, gorgeous.
Single-story, glass and pale wood, a courtyard with a fountain, and a nursery suite.
The staff have set out a welcome basket.
There is a night nanny named Delia with the calm, competent aura of someone who has raised kids and is unimpressed by billionaires.
But the better the support, the easier it is for Mason to leave.
Day one proves the theory.
He is out the door at six a.m. I see him at noon for fifteen minutes, during which he holds Simon, takes a call about oxidizer lines while holding Simon, and hands Simon back mid-sentence.
He texts at four: Running late, start the feeds without me.
He comes in at ten-forty, after both babies are asleep, smelling of desert night air and kerosene, and stands over the bassinets with an expression of such pure exhausted tenderness that I cannot even be angry.
Fine. I can be a little angry. I am a little angry.
The evening feed was supposed to be his.
It was on the whiteboard at home, cross his heart, and it got transferred to the residence whiteboard in the kitchen, because the staff, God help them, thought it was a charming thing to preserve.
At seven p.m. I am on the couch with a baby on each arm and the dual nursing pillow doing the heavy lifting, and Delia hovers with a warmed bottle.
“I can take one,” she says.
“If you take one, I still have to pump, and pumping is a whole thing with the machine and the parts and the flange situation.” I shift Simon up. He has already returned today’s lunch onto my shoulder, a small warm betrayal. “This is faster. It’s only slower.”
“Mm.” Delia sits down anyway, across from me, and starts folding tiny laundry. “Your husband seemed very sure about this feed.”
“My husband is very sure about a lot of things. It’s his best quality. It’s also the problem.”
She folds a onesie small enough to break your heart. “He’ll learn,” she says, like someone saying it might rain.
At nine, Mason texts a photo of a graph.
The thermal model, trending wrong. He adds three exclamation points and a sweating emoji, and I look at it for a long moment, this picture of a curve on a screen sent to a woman holding his entire genetic legacy, and I text back a photo of the feeding log.
Two columns of numbers, ounces and minutes, the only engineering in this building that I control.
He sends a heart. The graph gets solved or it doesn’t. The log continues either way.
I get both babies down by nine-thirty, which feels like summiting Everest. Sasha first, because she is the easier settler, a few sways and she’s out, five pounds of absolute trust. Simon requires the full ceremony — upright against my chest for twenty minutes minimum, paced laps of the nursery suite, the specific pat-pat-shush rhythm he demands with the inflexibility of a tiny despot. I
do laps. I do the math of how long he’s been alive versus how much of it he has spent unhappy, and the ratio is not good, and I would still trade every hour of sleep I have left to fix it.
The suite is quiet. The fountain burbles in the courtyard. Somewhere across the compound, my husband is saving his rocket.
I think about the version of this week Mason pitched — all of us together, evening feeds, the family on site — and I understand something I keep understanding and forgetting: he didn’t lie. He meant every word.
The pitch was real. It’s just that the pitch assumed he could be in two places, and he has never been punished for assuming that, because there is always someone holding the baby when he can’t. There is always staff. There is always me.
Money didn’t fail to buy him time with his children. It bought him out of needing it.
Day two, Jessica arrives.
I know this because I am in the courtyard with Sasha in the sling, doing our morning laps — walking is the only reliable way to get her to nap — when a black SUV pulls up and out she steps in white sunglasses and a suit, in the desert, in June, looking entirely unbothered by thermodynamics.
“Eve!” She greets me with the warmth of an old friend, which we are most definitely not. “Look at you. Out and about.”
“Jessica.” I have Sasha strapped to my chest and yesterday’s milk on my shirt, and I am aware that there is no version of this encounter I win.
She comes closer and performs a full appraisal, sunglasses now on top of her head.
“Honestly, you look well. So much better than I expected.” A pause precisely calibrated to let so much better than I expected do its work.
“People forget how much it takes out of you. The body really keeps score, doesn’t it? ”
“Three hours of sleep keeps the score too.”
“Mm.” She smiles and pats Sasha’s blanket, a gesture so proprietary I have to stop myself from stepping back. “Well. It’s wonderful you’re here. Morale matters. The men do better when the families are on site.”
The men.
“Is Mason in the blockhouse?” she asks, already walking. “Don’t get up.”
I was never getting up.
The press briefing is that afternoon, and I attend because Mason asked me to and because I have decided, day two, that vanishing is a habit I need to break.
I put on a real dress. The real dress doesn’t entirely zip, which is a negotiation I have with the mirror and lose gracefully, switching to the other real dress, the forgiving one. I put on concealer over the purple half-moons under my eyes.
My body is a construction site right now, hard-hat area, and I am not letting Jessica Mort within a mile of making me feel that as anything other than what it is: proof of work.
I bring both babies in the double stroller with Delia standing by at the back, an exit strategy with a driver’s license.
The briefing room is a glass box full of cameras.
Mason is at the podium in a navy suit and he is magnificent at this, he always has been — the vision, the humility, the joke at his own expense timed to the second.
The reporters love him. I used to stand at the back of rooms like this and feel lucky.
Now I stand at the back and feel like a prop they forgot to light.
Then Jessica joins him at the podium, unscheduled, in her stupid alabaster suit, and the cameras actually shift, physically tilt toward her, a field of black eyes adjusting.
“Odyssey,” she says, hand resting on the podium edge inches from Mason’s hand, “is our baby. Mason and I have been raising her together for a long time, and I promise you, she is going to be worth the wait.”
The room laughs. Delighted. Our baby. Mason smiles the tight smile of a man deciding in real time not to correct something. He says, “Mort Dynamics has been an essential partner,” which is true and also not the point, and moves to the next question.
Afterward, Jessica drifts over to the stroller. She looks down at the twins, then up at me.
“Two at once,” she says. “Goodness. Well, you’ve got your own projects now.”
She says it in front of three reporters and a photographer. Projects. Plural, diminutive, done.
I smile at her. “We call them Sasha and Simon. And projects have timelines. Babies are forever.”
Something flickers at the corner of her mouth. Not a crack so much as a note taken.
“Forever,” she repeats, tasting the word. “What a lovely way to think about it.” And then she’s gone, cream suit cutting through the crowd, people parting ahead of her. Ambulances, royalty, Jessica.
Delia materializes at my elbow with a burp cloth, which I don’t need, which is Delia’s way of asking if I’m all right.
“I’m all right,” I say.
“Mm,” says Delia.
I find Mason afterward in the corridor off the briefing room, and I keep my voice low, because I’m tired of being the scene.
“She called Odyssey your baby. On camera. And then she looked at my actual babies and called them my projects, in front of the press.”
He drags a hand through his hair. “I know. I heard the baby line. Eve, she’s doing it on purpose, you know that. She wants a reaction. The cameras were rolling, if I’d corrected her it becomes a story, and right now a story about a Tailor-Mort feud is exactly what the merger talks don’t need.”
“So there’s no version where she faces consequences?”
“There’s no version where we give her what she wants at the podium.” He takes my hands. He is warm, and sincere, and wrong. “You are smarter than her. You know what she’s doing. That’s why it doesn’t work on you.”
“It does work on me, Mason. That’s what I’m telling you. It works because you keep showing her she can get away with it.”
His phone buzzes. Then buzzes again. I watch him pretend not look at it, which is his concession to me, the visible effort of not looking.
“Two days,” he says. “Test’s Thursday. After the test, after the launch, I will deal with Jessica properly. I promise.”
Thursday.
Tuesday was last week’s Thursday.
His phone buzzes a third time, and this time he looks, and his face changes, and the conversation is over. Thermal numbers again. Always the thermal numbers. He kisses me, he kisses the stroller, and he goes.
I stand in the glass corridor with my babies and my concealer and watch him jog toward the blockhouse, and I think about Jessica’s hand inches from his hand, and how she’d measured that distance the way she measures damn near everything.
Close enough to photograph. Far enough for him to swear nothing happened.