Chapter Twenty-Three
Diwa opened the door, and the first thing Lysander thought was: Christ, he’s young.
He’d known this, technically. The alpha was twenty-nine, just two years older than Lysander and Stephen, which made him twelve years younger than Colin.
He’d spoken to the man on FaceTime hundreds of times, but the screens had smoothed the gulf between a twenty-nine-year-old’s jaw and a forty-one-year-old’s swollen hands.
In person, on the doorstep of a Notting Hill townhouse with an egg-yolk-yellow front door, there was nowhere for the arithmetic to hide.
Diwa looked like someone who still got asked for ID at Sainsbury’s.
He had thick, dark hair that fell across his forehead, and his arms, when they closed around Lysander, were dense with muscle.
His dad had really gone and got himself a toyboy.
Good for him.
“They’re all upstairs with the baby,” Diwa said.
Lysander dropped his luggage where he stood. The Samsonite landed on its side in the hallway, and he was already moving, his splinted ankle protesting on the first stair, then the second, then he stopped noticing because the smell hit him on the landing.
There genuinely wasn’t a word for what a newborn smelled like when the newborn was yours, a tiny creature that shared your blood.
The scent of Max bypassed every rational faculty Lysander possessed and went straight to the base of his skull, where it detonated into a warmth that suffused his whole body.
He found them in the master bedroom. Stephen was sharing the bed with their father, back propped on the headboard in one of Ryland’s oversized hoodies, his legs stretched out on the duvet.
Ryland cradled a bundle so small that it disappeared almost entirely into the crook of his elbow. He glanced up when Lysander came through the door, and his whole body tightened around the baby. His shoulders drew in, and his chin dropped, angling his jaw over Max.
“Give him to me,” Lysander said.
“He’s sleeping,” Ryland objected.
“I don’t care. Give me my nephew.”
“His sleep cycle is forty-five minutes. We’re at minute thirty-two. If he wakes up now, the whole schedule —”
Lysander crossed the room, leaned down, and kissed Ryland on the cheek. It was brief and firm, aimed squarely at breaking his concentration. While Ryland sat there blinking, Lysander lifted Max out of Ryland’s arms.
He was warm, and the smell of him intensified until Lysander’s eyes were streaming before he’d even got the baby settled against his chest. Max’s face was still red and creased, and his skull had rounded out from the alarming cone shape of the photos but still retained a slight asymmetry that Lysander found endearing.
“Hello, you,” Lysander whispered. He pressed his nose to Max’s soft tuft of dark hair and breathed in, and the sound that came out of him was so embarrassingly close to a sob that he had to disguise it as a cough.
“Hello, Max. I’m your Uncle Sander, and I’m going to be your favourite person in the whole world. ”
Max did not respond to this, on account of being eleven days old.
“Stevie.” Lysander’s vision blurred. His twin was watching him with an expression of such tenderness that it nearly finished him off.
Stephen’s eyes were ringed with the purple-grey shadows of a week without proper sleep, and there was a prominent stain on the front of Ryland’s hoodie that appeared to be baby sick.
He sat on the edge of the mattress, Max cradled in one arm, and leaned across to press his forehead on Stephen’s. They stayed like that for a moment, breathing the same air. Stephen reached out and gripped the back of Lysander’s neck, his fingers cold on Lysander’s skin.
“You look terrible,” Lysander told him.
“I pushed a human being out of my body, Sander.”
“Good job. He looks like a keeper.” He kissed Stephen’s cheek, then his temple, then the bridge of his nose, and Stephen submitted to the onslaught.
Max stirred on his chest, one fist uncurling and then clenching again around a fold of Lysander’s shirt. Lysander kissed the soft curve of Max’s cheek, then the ridiculous shell of his ear, which was so small and precious that Lysander almost couldn’t stop tracing out its shape with his fingertip.
“Daddy.” Lysander crossed over to Colin and sat down as carefully as he could, cradling Max. He leaned in and kissed his father’s cheek, then the corner of his eye where the tears were already running, pressing his lips to the thin skin.
Colin’s fingers trembled as they moved over Max’s blanket. He didn’t try to take him. He just touched him, mapping his grandchild through the fabric.
“He’s got Stephen’s nose,” Colin managed.
“And Ryland’s hair. Apparently.”
Colin cupped the side of Lysander’s face, his thumb pressing into the hollow beneath his cheekbone. His skin was puffy and warm, the oedema visible in his fingers, and Lysander turned his face and kissed his father’s swollen palm. “Welcome home, Sander.”
? ? ?
The master bedroom became the Huxley family headquarters.
Colin couldn’t leave the bed, so it became the centre of gravity that the rest of the household arranged itself around.
Diwa brought food, a full spread that he assembled on the wide oak dresser at the far wall, ferrying dishes up from the kitchen two at a time: chicken adobo in a clay pot, garlic fried rice, and lumpia arranged on a plate in tight golden rows.
Lysander watched him work.
He repositioned Colin’s pillows without being asked, one hand sliding behind Colin’s lower back to lift him while the other rearranged the stack, adding a cushion beneath that Colin sighed into.
Then Diwa’s hand settled on the swell of Colin’s stomach, his palm spread wide, fingers splayed over the taut fabric of the jumper, and he left it there while he talked to Ryland about Max’s nappy output.
He kept touching Colin’s belly. He’d be mid-conversation with Stephen, and it would drift right back to the bump, his thumb tracing small circles over the curve while Colin shifted his weight so that Diwa’s palm sat more comfortably on him.
His father, who had spent Lysander’s entire life taking care of others, was lying in a bed while his alpha fed him. This was everything he’d ever wished for Colin.
Ryland had positioned himself cross-legged at the foot of the bed with Max in the crook of one arm, and was making notes on his mobile with the other.
“What are you typing?” Stephen asked.
“Feeding log,” Ryland said. “Timestamp, duration, which breast, volume estimate in millilitres, and a subjective satisfaction rating on a scale of one to five.”
Stephen’s head fell back against the pillows. “A satisfaction rating.”
“His. Not mine. I’m assessing based on post-feed calmness, duration of sleep onset, and whether he cries within fifteen minutes of detaching.
” Ryland glanced down at Max, who was asleep with his mouth open and a thread of milk running from the corner of his lip to Ryland’s sleeve.
“This feed was a four point two. Strong latch. Minor fussing at minute seven, which I attribute to a suboptimal angle on the left breast.”
“Ryland.”
“We could push it to a four point five with better pillow support. I’ve been researching nursing pillows. There’s a U-shaped one on with four thousand reviews and a mean rating of four point six, although I suspect review bias, so I’ve adjusted the estimate down to four point three.”
Lysander bit the inside of his cheek and turned to his father, who was watching Ryland with a look of such profound fondness that it nearly made Lysander start crying again. Colin caught his eye and mouthed, I know.
“Tell Sander why you chose the name Max,” Stephen commanded. He made pointed eye contact with Lysander, his lips trembling with a suppressed grin.
“Max,” Ryland said, “is named after Max Planck. The father of quantum theory. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918 for his discovery of energy quanta, which fundamentally altered humanity’s understanding of atomic and subatomic processes.
” He looked down at his son. “I felt it was appropriate, given that this child has fundamentally altered my understanding of everything.”
Stephen rolled his eyes so hard that his whole head moved.
“Stephen wanted to name him Jacob,” Ryland added, in a tone that made it clear he considered this a near miss on par with an asteroid passing through Earth’s orbit.
“Jacob would have been a lovely name. Jacob Huxley-Ryland.”
“Jacob is what you name someone who would end up going on pub crawls and Contiki holidays.”
“I went on plenty of pub crawls and Contiki holidays in my early twenties, Ryland! I want that for Max.”
“And I want to set him up for a rich, intellectual life. Max Planck is the foundational figure of modern physics, Stephen. The Planck constant is literally one of the defining quantities of the universe. Without Max Planck, there is no quantum mechanics, there is no semiconductor technology, and there is no mobile phone on which you spent months googling baby names that won’t, and I quote, get our child punched in the playground. ”
“Diwa made us an app,” Stephen told Lysander, cutting across the lecture ruthlessly.
“Because we couldn’t agree on a single name for three months.
He built us a baby name app. Like Tinder, but for names.
We each created a list, and uploaded it.
Then you swipe right if you like it, left if you don’t, and it only shows you the matches. ”
Lysander glanced at Diwa, who shrugged one shoulder without removing his hand from Colin’s belly.
“It took twenty minutes to build,” Diwa said. “And it was faster than listening to them argue about it for another trimester.”
“Max was on both our lists,” Ryland said. “We both swiped right. Stephen didn’t know who Max Planck was, so technically I won by omission.”
Colin’s laugh started as a wheeze and ended as a full-body spasm. “We didn’t need the app,” Colin announced, once he’d got his breath back. “Diwa made a spreadsheet. Names down one side, meanings down the other. Filipino names, English names, everything. He’d colour-coded them.”
“Of course he had,” Lysander murmured.
“I looked at that spreadsheet for about thirty seconds.” Colin’s hand drifted to his bump, his fingers spreading over the curve. “And there it was. Tala.” The word came out soft, like it belonged only to him and to his little girl. “It means star in Filipino.”
Diwa reached across and gathered both of Colin’s hands in his own.
“He also had Tesla on the list,” Stephen said. “And Fermi. As in, the paradox about existential loneliness.”
“People get hung up on the loneliness side of things,” Ryland said.
He shifted Max to his other arm. “The Fermi Paradox addresses the apparent contradiction between the high probability of extra-terrestrial civilisations and the lack of observable evidence for them. Everyone treats the silence as the sad part.” His voice stayed level, his gaze fixed on a point somewhere above Stephen’s left shoulder.
“It really isn’t, though. All that space, all that time, and the expected number of voices answering back is effectively zero.
That’s the baseline. That’s what’s normal.
” He smiled at Stephen. “So a person just existing is extraordinary. You and I existing, and then making an entire person together — that’s the universe doing the one thing it almost never does. ”
The bedroom went quiet. Colin burst into tears, a full, hormonally catastrophic meltdown that shook his entire body. Diwa pulled him in without a word, Colin’s face disappearing into the front of his shirt.
Stephen’s mouth compressed into a line. “I hate it when you say things like that,” he grumbled.
Ryland’s gaze sharpened behind his glasses, recalibrating from astrophysics to opportunity analysis with alarming speed. “So can we name the next one Fermi?”
“No, Ryland.”
“The case is strong.”
Stephen shook his head. “We can do Henry. For Enrico. Or Alan, for Turing. How about that?”
Ryland considered this. His thumb traced the curve of Max’s ear, and after a moment, he nodded. “As long as there’s a next one,” he said.