Chapter 305: Where are you going?
The look she gave him this time was something else entirely a slow, eloquent expression that contained within it approximately thirty years of accumulated evidence to the contrary.
"Cute," she repeated, with the careful enunciation of a woman tasting a word and finding it wholly insufficient.
"You and your brother almost sent me to an early grave." She shook her head, and the memories seemed to arrive in a procession she had not asked for.
"Climbing things you had absolutely no business climbing. Fighting each other from morning until evening. Do you have any idea, any idea at all how lucky you are right now?"
Julian pressed his lips together to keep from smiling.
"That’s fair," he said. "That is entirely fair."
"Mm." She looked back at Amara and the babies, and the wistfulness returned, gentler now.
Julian was quiet for a moment. He looked at his wife, still moving softly around the room, still entirely absorbed, still wholly unaware she had an audience.
He looked at baby Justina, small and new and impossibly real. He looked at his son in the other bassinet, sleeping with the total, boneless peace of someone who had not yet discovered that the world was complicated.
"I’m lucky," he said at last, and his voice had dropped to something quieter than a whisper. "And I am happy." He exhaled slowly.
"I have a little one who is going to look exactly like me and drive me completely mad. And I have a little one who is going to be exactly like her incredible mother and make me feel like the luckiest man alive every single day." He paused.
"Every wait was worth it, Mother. Every single difficult day was worth exactly this moment."
Madam Vale did not respond immediately.
She reached over instead and placed her hand briefly over his, just for a second, just a light press of her palm against the back of his hand, and then she let go.
"Now," Madam Vale announced, pushing the door wide open now with the particular energy of a woman who had decided that tender moments were lovely, but she had been standing in a corridor long enough, "I need to interrupt this."
Amara turned around with a smile that took over her entire face.
She was holding baby Justina, and Justina, all ten pounds of her, was dressed in a pink bubble dress with matching leggings, a bow the approximate size of a small satellite dish fastened to the very top of her head. She looked like someone had wrapped a present and then put a ribbon on the ribbon.
Amara held her up slightly, the way people hold things they are very proud of.
"What do you think of the ribbon?" she said, tilting her head to consider it herself. "Actually, I think a bigger one might look even better..."
"Okay." Julian was already walking into the room, eyes on his daughter, expression caught somewhere between amusement and genuine concern.
"Okay, let’s relax. She is a baby. She is not competing in anything. She should be in a onesie. Something soft. Something with snaps."
"Who said she isn’t comfortable?" Amara said immediately, pulling Justina slightly back with the instinctive defensiveness of someone whose creative vision is being questioned.
"She is perfectly comfortable. And for your information, what you wear is important."
"She is six weeks old."
"And she already looks wonderful, which is a habit we are starting early."
Julian opened his mouth, reconsidered, and turned toward the other bassinet.
Baby Josh was lying on his back in a pair of tiny shorts, a miniature cap tilted on his head, and shoes actual shoes, the small, stiff kind with velcro on the feet that had not yet touched a single surface in the outside world. Julian looked at the outfit. Then at the shoes. Then back at the outfit.
He reached in and lifted his son carefully, settling him against his chest, and held him out slightly to get the full picture.
"Dude," he said.
Josh blinked, or did something that was close enough to blinking.
"You are fully dressed," Julian continued, in the tone of a man having a reasonable conversation, "and all you do is eat and sleep." He looked at the shoes again. The tiny, pristine, completely pointless shoes.
"You have shoes on. You cannot walk. You have never walked." He looked at the cap.
"The cap, though," he murmured, almost to himself, and something in his voice shifted slightly because the cap was, genuinely, very good.
The room broke apart into laughter, warm and easy, and the kind that fills a space completely. Madam Vale laughed with her whole chest. Amara laughed and pressed her cheek gently against the top of Justina’s enormous ribbon. Even the nurse at the far end of the room made a sound she quickly tried to contain behind a clipboard.
Julian looked at his son’s face, serene and untroubled above the tiny cap, and laughed quietly too.
—-
Madam Vale stayed for a few days.
She did not make a fuss about it, and she did not make herself a guest. She moved through the house the way she had always moved through spaces she loved purposefully, usefully, quietly making things better without drawing attention to the fact that she was doing it.
She held the babies. She sat with Amara in the evenings. She and Julian drank tea together some mornings before the house fully woke up, and they talked, or they didn’t, and both were fine.
On her last morning, she came downstairs with her suitcase already in her hand.
It was a single case. Elegant, well-traveled, the kind that had been many places and showed it gracefully.
Julian saw it and felt his chest tighten slightly. "Where are you going?" he asked, though he already suspected the answer would not be a specific address.
"Paris first," his mother said, setting the case by the front door with the easy certainty of someone who had thought this through thoroughly and was not open to amendments. "Then Toronto. After that," she made a small, pleasant gesture with her hand, "we will see."
Julian looked at her.
"I’ll send you a postcard," she added, which was not the reassurance he had been looking for.
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