Chapter 25
The stamp made a small, unimpressive sound.
Nora heard it from the second chair, the one George had positioned at a respectful angle to the desk.
George turned the document and set it in front of Rognar with the reverence of a man presenting a knighthood.
She thought it was strange how the largest things in a life arrived so quietly.
Just a stamp and a date filled in by hand.
George’s fountain pen, uncapped and recapped.
That was all it took to make Rognar permanently and unquestionably Charlie’s father.
“Well,” George said. He said it the way other men said finally, or thank God, or wept. “That concludes the matter.”
“That’s it?” Rognar asked.
“That is, I assure you, entirely it.” George squared the pages against the desk, though they were already square.
“Guardianship is finalized. Paternity is a matter of record. There will be a certified copy in the mail within ten business days, and I would advise you to store it somewhere you will not lose it, though of course—” a small, dry cough “—Ms. Bennett is present, so I suspect it will be filed appropriately.”
“It will be filed appropriately,” she said.
“I don’t doubt it.” George stood, and put out his hand, and shook Rognar’s, and then went on shaking it for a beat too long, holding the enormous green hand in both of his small conservative ones.
Something showed in his careful, meticulously groomed face that she hadn’t seen there in eight weeks of appointments.
“Congratulations, Mr. Stonebreaker. It has been… That is to say, not every matter I handle concludes in a manner I find personally—” He stopped, cleared his throat, and released Rognar’s hand. “Congratulations.”
Rognar didn’t answer right away. She looked over at him and saw why.
He was holding the document—the single stamped page with his daughter’s name on it and his own beneath it—and he wasn’t making a joke about it.
He wasn’t saying do you know how these work or I’ve seen them on television or any of the seventeen deflections she had cataloged over eight weeks.
He was looking at the page, and his jaw was working under the neat dark beard.
When he finally spoke, his voice had gone somewhere low and raw that she’d only heard three or four times, always in rooms with no audience in them.
“Eight weeks ago,” he said, “I didn’t know she existed.”
“I know,” she said quietly.
“Eight weeks.”
“I know.”
He folded the page once, carefully, along a crease that would make it fit a pocket. Then unfolded it again, because you did not fold a page like this, and refolded it a different way.
She watched a professional athlete the size of a doorway be defeated by the question of how to carry a piece of paper.
Then she took it out of his hands and slid it into the folder she had brought for exactly this purpose, and he let her, and looked at her, and didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to.
“I’ll walk you out,” George said, bending over his folders to give them a moment. It was the kindest thing she had ever seen him do.
The quiet celebration was going to be three people.
That had been the plan, made at Rognar’s kitchen table two evenings before, with Charlie asleep and the antibiotics down to the last two days and everything for once at rest. The three of them, a decent bottle, something from the good place with the dumplings, and an early night.
She had written it down. She had written 3 at the top of a page and nothing else under it because there was nothing else, and it had felt, looking at the number, like the most complete plan she had ever made.
Fen found out at eleven that morning.
She was never entirely certain how. Rognar swore he’d told no one. She hadn’t told anyone. But Fen had a readership now, as Fen was fond of saying, and by one o’clock there was a text on Rognar’s phone that read CONGRATS DAD what time, and by two there was a slow cooker.
Nobody knew whose slow cooker it was. It arrived with Korvash, but Korvash said it wasn’t his, it was Kowalski’s.
Kowalski said he’d only carried it in from the truck.
The truck was Jensen’s, and Jensen had gone home.
The slow cooker sat on Rognar’s counter producing the undeniable smell of a chili that nobody would claim custody of.
Which she found, in the circumstances, thematically appropriate.
By four there were nineteen people in the house.
She counted. Of course she counted. Nineteen, plus one baby, plus one slow cooker of uncertain parentage, plus a green mohawk currently bent double explaining to a seven-month-old why the 4T jersey was, in fact, the correct size and would simply require patience.
“She’ll grow into it, Nora.”
“Fen, she’s inside it. That’s not wearing a jersey, that’s a hostage situation.”
“It’s aspirational sizing.”
“She could turn around in there and you’d lose her.”
“That,” said Fen delightedly, “is a feature.”
Kowalski appeared at Nora’s elbow with a correctly-sized jersey, produced from nowhere as always, and refused as always to say where it came from.
He dressed Charlie in it with the deft competence of a male who had never once admitted to owning a baby, and Charlie chewed the collar, and the team laughed and cheered.
She stood in the doorway of the kitchen she now half-lived in and let the noise surround her.
It was too loud. It was disorderly. There was chili of unknown origin bubbling on a counter she had wiped that morning. A male she had done the accounts for was drinking her good wine. Someone had put music on. And it was, by every metric she had spent almost thirty years constructing, a disaster.
She liked it enormously.
She kept running into that, all afternoon.
Like her hand going to the shelf where Rognar kept the mugs instead of the shelf where she kept them.
She waited for the old, familiar panic. She stood in the doorway of a house full of enormous loud orcs.
She waited for the tightening in her chest that eight weeks ago would have had her reaching for a notebook and a clean page and a plan.
It didn’t come. Nothing tightened, nothing clenched, and that was so much worse. She’d thought the very same thing weeks ago, standing in her kitchen doorway.
No. Not worse, better. She meant better. She was still learning the vocabulary.
Tarmek came at five, Edie under his arm with paint still on the side of her hand and a bakery box balanced on her palm.
“We’re not staying long,” Tarmek said, which meant they intended to stay a while, and set a bottle down.
“He said that in the truck,” Edie said. “He’s said it four times.
He wants to see the baby, he just doesn’t want anyone to know he wants to see the baby.
” She kissed Nora’s cheek with a cheerful smile.
“Congratulations. On all of it. The paper thing. The him thing.” A grin.
“The obvious thing nobody’s supposed to mention. ”
“There’s no obvious thing.”
“Sure there isn’t.”
She watched the captain of the Emerald Enforcers cross a crowded room towards her daughter without appearing to hurry and without appearing to have a destination.
He crouched carefully in front of the sofa where Charlie sat propped and imperial in the mystery jersey.
Charlie regarded him with the total absorption she reserved for large green males.
Then he did something she didn’t understand.
There was a window behind the sofa, the low afternoon light coming through it grey and cold.
Tarmek lifted Charlie’s small chubby hand and set her palm against the cold glass.
Then he lightly placed his enormous palm over it.
Glass and hand and hand. He held it there for two seconds.
Charlie stared at the arrangement with the delight of a scientist whose experiment has confirmed the hypothesis.
She looked for Rognar to find out whether this was a joke.
He was already watching. He stood motionless against the far wall with a beer he wasn’t drinking, and there was nothing amused in his face at all.
Whatever the window thing was, he’d found it funny once.
He didn’t find it funny anymore. He was watching Tarmek press a baby’s hand to a pane of glass, with the same expression he’d worn holding a page with a stamp on it.
She crossed the room to stand beside him without deciding to and put her shoulder against his arm.
He came back from wherever he’d gone and looked down at her.
“You okay?”
“I’m having,” he said, “a lot of feelings. I’d like it noted for the record that I’m handling them extremely well.”
“You’re not drinking your beer.”
“I’m savoring it.”
“You’ve savored it for an hour.”
“It’s a very good beer, Nora.” He put his arm around her in front of nineteen people and a slow cooker.
They had a rule about that, or had had a rule about it.
Rule three, we do not tell the team, a rule that had not survived Fen and that neither of them had bothered to mourn.
“Eight weeks,” he said quietly, watching his daughter.
“Eight weeks ago I owned nothing. I didn’t have a bottle.
I stood in a shop and almost cried at a wall of…
You weren’t there, but there was a wall and there were seventeen kinds of—”
“I’ve heard about the wall.”
“It was a genuinely traumatic wall.”
“I know.”
“And now there’s—” He stopped. Looked around the room, at the noise and the chaos, the chili, the mohawk, the captain and the baby and the cold window, and the overloud impossible afternoon. “There’s this.”
“There’s this,” she agreed, leaning against a male who ran hot enough to warm the room through his shirt.