Page 97 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
“That’s not Braxton-Hicks,” she says.
“No.”
“You’re not due for—” She stops. “Elena. You’re not due for three more weeks.”
“I know.”
“So why are you?—”
“Mara.” I look at her. “Get me Roman!”
She already has her phone out.
Roman gets me to the Kessler facility in eleven minutes.
I know this because I’m counting things, the way you count things when your body is doing something large and frightening, and counting gives your brain somewhere to be. Eleven minutes from the moment he came through the penthouse door with his jacket half-on and his phone already in his hand, he took one look at me, braced against the kitchen counter and said, “Let’s go,” in the voice he uses when a decision has been made and the only remaining variable is execution.
He doesn’t let go of my hand in the car.
He doesn’t let go of my hand in the corridor.
He doesn’t let go of my hand when Dr. Reyes comes in and checks me and looks up from the examination with the focused calm I have come to rely on, and says, “You are seven centimeters, these babies are coming today.”
Roman’s hand tightens around mine.
I look at him.
He looks at me.
“Okay,” I say to both of them.
The delivery is long.
I will not pretend otherwise. Four hours and forty minutes from the moment Dr. Reyes saidtodayto the moment the room fills with the first cry, and every minute of it is its own experience that I’m not going to minimize by summarizing. Roman stays for all of it.
He doesn’t sit in the corridor, doesn’t step out for air, doesn’t check his phone. He stands at the side of the bed and he holds my hand and when I tell him I can’t do this he says, “You are doing it right now.” When I tell him I need him to stop talking he stops talking, and when I tell him to talk again he talks. He reads the room with the same attention he brings to everything that matters to him.
Nikolai arrives first, at four seventeen in the afternoon, announcing himself with a cry that fills the room immediately and completely.
Mikhail follows four minutes later, quieter, his eyes open almost immediately, looking at the room.
Dr. Reyes puts Nikolai in Roman’s arms.
I watch it happen.
Roman has held boardrooms. He has held a key in his hand in a lobby on 48th Street and understood the weight of what it meant. He has held a gun and the reins of an organization and the cold control of a man who doesn’t allow himself to need things.
He has never held anything like this.
He looks down at Nikolai in his arms, and his face does the thing it did at the ultrasound, open, undefended, stripped of every layer he keeps between himself and the world. His jaw movesonce, and he doesn’t speak, and I lie in the hospital bed with Mikhail against my chest and I look at my husband holding our son.
I think about everything that was at the beginning.
I think about everything it has become.
Roman looks up from Nikolai, and he finds my eyes across the room. Neither of us says anything because there’s nothing left to say that is not already in this room, already in his face, already in the weight of a tiny boy in his arms, and the weight of another against my chest, and the silence of a moment that was always going to end up here.
It just took the long way.
