Chapter Twenty-Two
Lysander’s mobile lit up at ten past two in the morning, and he had it to his ear before his eyes were open.
“Sander.” Ryland’s voice was tight. “He’s here.”
The screen filled with a face so red and compressed that it barely qualified as a face.
His skull was elongated into a shape that no human skull should be able to take on, narrowing to a soft, misshapen point at the crown where the bones had been squeezed together during their passage into the world.
Lysander burst into tears.
“Oh my God.” He shoved himself upright against the headboard, his splinted ankle forgotten, and dragged the duvet off Hamish in the process. “Oh my God, oh my God, look at him. Look at his little face. Ryland, he’s perfect!”
Beside him, Hamish made a noise like a man being pulled from the wreckage of a building. “Wha’s happening.”
“Max is here!” Lysander grabbed Hamish’s arm with his free hand, his nails digging crescents into the skin. “My nephew is here, Hamish, look at him, look at him —”
He thrust the mobile into Hamish’s line of sight. Hamish squinted at the screen groggily, and said, “That’s a baby.”
“That’s my nephew.”
“He looks like a cross between Winston Churchill and a kidney bean.”
Lysander smacked him in the chest and snatched his mobile back. Ryland had the camera so close to Max that the resolution had given up, dissolving the baby into a pixelated blur of bright pink. Ryland pulled back just enough for the image to sharpen.
“Three point four kilograms,” Ryland said.
“Four thirty-five PM, BST. Fifty-one centimetres. Apgar score of nine at one minute and nine at five minutes, which the midwife said was excellent. His head circumference is thirty-five centimetres. He’s got Stephen’s nose.
” The camera wobbled as Ryland adjusted his grip, and a tuft of dark hair appeared at the crown of the misshapen skull.
“And my hair, I think. Or it might be Stephen’s hair. We’ve both got dark hair.”
Lysander was crying so hard that snot was running into his mouth. He wiped his eyes on the sheet and pressed the mobile closer. “Turn the camera round. Let me see Stevie.”
The image swung in a dizzying arc across a hospital ceiling, a strip of fluorescent light, the edge of a monitor, and then settled on Stephen.
His hair was dark with sweat, plastered to his forehead. His eyes were half-closed in a face so pale and drawn that it looked like someone had taken an eraser to his usual features and rubbed until only the essential lines remained. A drip ran into the back of his left hand.
“Stevie.” Lysander’s voice cracked on the second syllable.
Stephen opened his eyes. The effort it took was visible. He looked at the camera, and the corners of his mouth pulled into a smile so exhausted they barely moved.
“Hi, Sander.” His voice was a thread. “He’s got all his fingers and toes. Ryland counted twice.”
“Three times,” Ryland corrected, off-camera. “I counted three times. I needed to be sure.”
“How are you feeling, Stevie? Really?”
Stephen’s eyes had drifted half-shut again, his head listing sideways into the pillows. “Like I’ve been turned inside out and put back the wrong way round.” His fingers tightened on the bundle in his lap. “But he’s here, Sander. He’s actually here, and he smells incredible.”
“He smells like Stephen,” Ryland confirmed from somewhere off-screen. “I checked. I put my nose directly against his head and inhaled, and he smells exactly like Stephen, which the midwife said was normal and then asked me to step back.”
Lysander laughed, and the sound came out wet and wrecked. “Has Daddy seen him yet?”
“Ryland sent him photos ten seconds after the birth. Diwa rang to say Daddy cried so hard the neighbours could hear him through the wall.” Stephen’s smile was fading at the edges, his eyelids growing heavier with each blink.
“He wants to come down but the doctor won’t let him off bed rest, and he’s furious about it. He called the doctor a jobsworth.”
“That’s my daddy.”
“Sander, I need to —” Stephen’s hand lifted off the blanket in a gesture that didn’t quite finish. “I need to sleep. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t you dare apologise.” Lysander scrubbed the sheet across his eyes again and pulled himself together, or tried to. “Go to sleep, Stevie. I love you. Tell my nephew I’m coming to meet him as soon as I can walk properly.”
“Love you too.” The words were barely there. The camera lurched, and then Ryland appeared, his forehead filling the screen.
“I’ll send you photos,” Ryland said. “I’ve taken three hundred and twelve so far. Some of them are blurry because my hands were shaking, but I’ve kept them all because I read that blurry photos have sentimental value.”
“Send me every single one.”
“Already on it,” Ryland said, and Lysander’s mobile began to vibrate steadily with incoming messages.
The photos arrived in a torrent. Max from above.
Max from the side. Max’s hand wrapped around Ryland’s index finger, the size difference so absurd that it looked like a special effect.
Max’s foot, five toes fanned out like a starfish against Ryland’s palm.
Max in Stephen’s arms, his squashed face pressed to Stephen’s chest. Max from an angle so unflattering that it appeared to have been taken from inside Stephen’s armpit, and Lysander loved that one most of all because it meant Ryland had been leaning over both of them, trying to get closer.
Lysander was scrolling through the photos with his thumb, tears still running freely, when a soft knock came from the bedroom door.
“Come in, Cass,” Hamish said, fully awake now and sitting up with his glasses retrieved from the bedside table.
The door opened and Cassian appeared in his blue robe, his hair sticking up at angles that defied physics. The bruise on his cheekbone had darkened overnight to a deep, mottled purple. He hovered in the doorway.
“Is it the baby?”
“It’s the baby.” Lysander held the mobile out, and Cassian crossed the room in three quick strides and dropped onto the bed beside him, tucking his legs beneath him and leaning in so close that his chin was practically on Lysander’s shoulder.
The mattress dipped under his weight and Hamish’s hand came up automatically to steady Lysander’s splinted ankle beneath the duvet.
Cassian studied the photo. Max stared back, red-faced and livid, his skull tapering to its improbable point.
“Oh,” Cassian breathed. His fingers came up to the screen and traced the outline of the baby’s head with one careful fingertip. “Oh, he’s wonderful.”
Lysander swiped to the next photo, and the next, and Cassian made a reverent sound at each one, his shoulder pressed warm against Lysander’s.
“Don’t worry about his head,” Cassian said, settling deeper against the pillows and pulling the robe tighter around himself.
“It’ll round out in a few days. The bones haven’t fused yet, so they overlap during the birth to fit through the canal, and then they sort themselves out afterwards.
” He tapped the glass gently, right on the peak of Max’s elongated skull.
“He’ll look much more normal by the end of the week. ”
Lysander turned to stare at him. “How do you know that?”
Cassian looked mildly offended by the question. “I’ve delivered eleven lambs, Sander, and I’ve taken care of plenty of new babies.”
? ? ?
The days before the flight passed in a blur of logistics and Cassian’s increasingly creative attempts to be indispensable.
He brought Lysander tea without being asked, appearing at the bedroom door with the mug held in both hands and his chin tilted at an angle that said look how helpful I’m being, please don’t leave me.
He’d taken over Lysander’s morning routine with a competence that would have been impressive if it hadn’t been so transparently motivated by separation anxiety.
Lysander’s ankle got iced on a schedule. His laundry appeared folded on the bed.
“You don’t need to hover, Cass.”
“I’m not hovering.” Cassian was hovering. He’d positioned himself at the foot of the bed with a lint roller, running it over Lysander’s carry-on bag. “I’m de-linting.”
“The bag is leather.”
“Leather can have lint.”
His ankle was healing, but slowly, and Lysander had been babying it for a week in preparation for the flight.
He’d booked business class without flinching at the price, because the alternative was spending twenty-two hours in economy with his foot wedged against the seat in front while some stranger’s child kicked the back of his headrest, and he’d been through enough recently without adding that to the list. He just needed to get home for Max, and his daddy.
Colin had taken a turn.
That was how Diwa phrased it on the phone: he’s taken a turn, Lysander, but there’s nothing to panic about yet.
His blood pressure wasn’t coming down. The swelling had spread from Colin’s ankles to his hands, and the protein in his urine had spiked high enough that the obstetric team had started talking about early delivery.
Lysander had started calling Diwa before his check-ins with his dad, because Diwa didn’t perform bravery for his benefit.
Diwa said things like the consultant used the word “concerning” twice in one sentence and he threw up this morning and I had to change the sheets while he cried, and Lysander could build an accurate picture from the wreckage of those details in a way he couldn’t from Colin’s cheerful insistence that Gerald the ceiling crack was keeping him company.
The flat in Knightsbridge was gone. He didn’t have a London address anymore, so he’d stay at Diwa and Colin’s in Notting Hill. That was the obvious answer, and it was where he wanted to be anyway. Beyond that, the geography of his future was a problem he wasn’t ready to commit to yet.
Getting a London flat meant choosing London. Choosing London meant not choosing Melbourne, and Melbourne was where his alpha was growing basil on the kitchen windowsill and his Cassian was learning to acclimatise to the modern world.