9. Tyler
TYLER
Harper wakes me at six-thirty, and for the first time since she arrived, the sound doesn't put me into immediate crisis mode.
I get up. I go to her. I check her diaper, which is soaked through, and change her on the table, getting the tabs secure on the first attempt, and into clean pajamas because she's peed through. Then head downstairs for a bottle, Harper fussing against my shoulder the whole way.
Nora appears in the kitchen doorway before I've finished warming the water. Auburn hair up in a messy bun, pajama pants, and a tank top. She's half asleep, but her eyes are already focused, alert in the specific way they get when Harper's crying.
"You got it?" she asks, watching me test the temperature on my wrist.
"Yeah. I've got it."
She leans against the doorframe and watches.
Doesn't take over, doesn't offer commentary.
Just backs me up from a distance, the way she has all week, stepping in only when I'm actually getting it wrong, and letting me do it the rest of the time.
It's the most useful kind of trust. I'm learning how rare it is.
Harper latches, and the crying stops. The silence settles through the house.
"Good?" Nora says.
"Good."
She pushes off the doorframe and disappears back toward the stairs. I watch the empty doorway for a moment longer than I need to.
Nora films a clip. Tummy time, coffee, and Harper discovering a new sound, somewhere between a coo and a complaint, which she deploys unpredictably throughout the morning.
I watch it back six times. I'm not sure when watching a baby make a noise became something I'd do six times in a row, but I don't question it. I just watch it again. She's mine.
"What's next?" I ask. "Developmentally."
Nora is on the couch, coffee in hand. She runs through it: head control, reaching, rolling, sitting up, and eventually crawling. She’s precise and interested, like she genuinely enjoys the subject and happens to know it all.
I'm watching her more than I'm watching Harper.
I note that and file it away.
We take Harper outside in the mid-morning.
Nora grabs a blanket, and we spread it under the tree in the backyard where the shade is good.
The air is warm but not heavy, the kind of morning that hasn't committed to being brutal yet, and the grass smells like someone nearby cut it recently.
We lie there on either side of Harper while she watches the leaves move.
It's quiet in a different way from the house’s quiet. Birds. Someone's lawnmower somewhere. Harper’s tracking the shadows of branches above her with serious concentration.
"She's going to be clever," I say, lying on my elbows.
"She already is. Watch her eyes; she's tracking the movement."
I watch Harper. Then I watch Nora watching Harper.
The morning light catches the red in her long wavy hair where it's come out of the bun, and I notice, not for the first time, that she's beautiful in a way that doesn't announce itself.
It's the kind of thing that creeps up on you: the line of her jaw, the way the light sits on her face when she's not performing anything for anyone.
She's on her side, her expression gone soft, the professional composure set aside for a moment.
She looks like she belongs here.
The thought arrives before I can stop it, clear and uncomplicated, and I have no idea what to do with it, so I look back at Harper.
The moment happens during a diaper change.
I've got Harper on the mat in the living room, reaching for the wipes, and Nora comes out of the kitchen at the same moment with them in her hand, and we touch—just our fingers, just for a second—and we both go still.
Her hand is warm. Soft. There are calluses at the base of her fingers—from what, I don't know. I'm aware of the contact, but with a specificity that makes no sense, and I know it’s because of the thought I had outside under the tree, the one I thought I filed away but clearly didn’t file away well enough.
She pulls back first.
"Sorry." Her voice is slightly off. "Here."
She sets the wipes down and walks back to the kitchen without looking at me.
I finish the diaper change and don't think about it.
I think about it constantly for the rest of the afternoon.
We're in the same room, and I'm aware of her.
The way she moves through the house. The sound of her voice when she's talking to Harper, low and warm, is completely different from the professional register she uses with me.
The way her hair catches the afternoon light when she leans forward. The way she folds Harper's onesies.
She's my employee. She lives in my house. Whatever I'm feeling when she reaches past me in the kitchen, and her arm brushes mine, it goes nowhere. It has to go nowhere.
I wasn't always like this. There was a version of me that knew how to be around people without calculating the damage first. But I buried that somewhere in Pinewood, and what's left has a specific and recent track record of ruining things. I don't want to ruin her, too.
Bath time comes along quickly—which is mostly solo now—with Nora in the doorway. I support Harper's head with one hand and wash with the other, and Harper endures it with the martyred patience of someone who finds injustice upsetting but inevitable.
"You're getting good at this," Nora says.
"Haven't dropped her. That's the bar."
She laughs, quick and unguarded, and it hits me somewhere in the chest before I can prepare for it. She doesn't laugh like that with me very often, not the real kind, and I feel it the way you feel something you've been waiting for without knowing you were waiting for it.
We move to the nursery for pajamas and the final bottle.
The room is small, and we're both in it, moving in the choreography we've worked out over nine days.
She takes burp cloths from the changing table, and I get pajamas from the drawer.
She makes the bottle, while I wrestle Harper into the moon-and-stars sleeper.
Every time we get close, I'm aware of it.
When she reaches past me, her sleeve brushes my arm.
When I turn and find us suddenly inches apart, close enough to see the green in her hazel eyes, the air between us goes tight in a way that has nothing to do with the room being small. For one moment, neither of us moves.
I clear my throat and step back. "Sorry."
"It's fine." But our voices say otherwise.
I settle into the glider with Harper and her bottle. Nora stands by the crib, folding tiny onesies by size, her hair falling out of its bun again, and I watch her because I'm sitting, and she's there, and I've given up pretending I'm not going to look.
She catches me.
"What?" she asks.
"Nothing. Just—thanks. For everything."
"It's what I do, West."
West. Still West. Nine days of the same house and the same baby and midnights on the couch, and she still puts that word between us like a door she wants to keep locked.
I told myself early on that being professional was the right call, that I wasn't in any position to be feeling whatever this was, and I meant it. I still mean it.
The thing is, Reaper has been calling me West since day one.
He spits it across the ice like something he's scraped off his skate.
The name followed me out of Pinewood and into every locker room silence and every deliberate non-pass in this city.
I'd started to hate the sound of it. And then she said it on the nursery floor in the middle of the night, and it was somehow completely different, like the same word in a different language.
I don't have an explanation for that. I just know that when it comes from her, it doesn't feel like the thing it used to be.
But nine days of meaning it hasn't stopped the feeling from showing up anyway, louder each time, and I don't know what to do with that except keep pretending I don't notice it. I should be grateful for the word. I know the reasons for it. Right now, I just kind of hate it.
Harper finishes her bottle and passes out. I transfer her to the crib with the careful precision of someone who has learned that the last few inches are what matter, and she doesn't stir.
"Good job," Nora whispers.
We stand side by side looking at her. The white noise machine hums low in the corner, the nightlight casting everything in a soft amber glow, and Harper breathes steadily between us.
Something about Nora saying that, two quiet words in the dark, lands differently than I expected.
Like I needed to hear it from her specifically and didn't know that until just now.
"Nine days," I say quietly.
"Feels longer."
"In a good way?"
She glances at me, something in her expression I get for one second before she puts it away.
"In a good way," she says.
We leave together and pull the door mostly closed. The hallway is narrow, and we're standing close, that same awareness from the afternoon pressing in.
"Goodnight, West," she says.
"Night, Red."
The word comes out before I've decided to say it. She stops, and I feel it immediately, the same thing she must have felt the first time she called me West, that lurch of having said something you didn't plan to say and not being able to take it back.
"Red?"
I gesture vaguely at her hair. "Your hair. It's auburn. Red. I don't know why I said that."
She looks at me for two beats. Three.
"Goodnight," she says, and closes her door.
I go downstairs to clean Harper's bottles. Before I know it, I've washed the same one twice.
Red. I gave her a nickname. The same person I've been telling myself is just an employee in my house.
I'm so fucked.