Page 67 of That Defining Moment

Cassian’s hand came off the table slowly and his fingertips found the knitted ear of the koala and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. The quick, shallow pulls of his breath slowed.

“I want her to have soft things,” Colin said. “Things that’ll make her feel like she’s being hugged all the time.”

Cassian’s lip trembled. His gaze dropped from the koala ear to Tala’s face beneath it, her round, uncomprehending eyes tracking the movement of his fingers on the fabric.

“She does look very nice in it,” Cassian managed.

“She looks ridiculous,” Colin said fondly. “That’s the whole point.”

The table exhaled. Lysander caught Stephen’s eye across the adobo, and his twin gave him a look that said He’s still got it. Hamish’s hand found Lysander’s knee and squeezed.

Ryland had remained perfectly still throughout. He opened his mouth, and Stephen’s hand landed on his thigh.

“Not now,” Stephen murmured. “Leave him to daddy.”

Chapter Thirty-One

The Huxleys were very loud, and getting even more so as the empty wine bottles on the table started piling up.

“—so I’m half asleep, I’ve got one eye open, and I hear Ryland get out of bed,” Stephen was saying, gesturing with a lumpia. “And I think, right, he’s gone to do the feed, brilliant, I’ll go back to sleep. But then I hear rustling, and clicking. So I get up and go to the nursery, and Ryland has covered the far wall of the room in glow-in-the-dark star stickers.”

Colin’s hand flew to his mouth.

“Tell them why,” Stephen said, turning to Ryland.

Ryland straightened in his chair. “Max’s urination trajectory is inconsistent,” he said. “Both in arc height and directional spread. When you change a nappy in low light, you can’t see where the stream is going until it’s already hit you, the wall, or on one occasion, my laptop screen.” He adjusted his glasses. “The star stickers create a visual map. Each sticker marks a confirmed strike zone. Over the course of a week, the pattern reveals his dominant spray vectors, which allows me to position the changing mat at the optimal defensive angle.”

Hamish had put his forehead on the table and was laughing so hard that his shoulders shook.

“He’s got a heat map,” Stephen said. “Of our infant son’s wee. Stuck to the nursery wall in glow-in-the-dark stars.”

“It’s not a heat map,” Ryland said. “A heat map implies graduated intensity values. This is a scatter plot.”

The laughter rolled over Cassian like warm bathwater. He smiled when they smiled and laughed when the room laughed. He genuinely found Ryland’s star map funny, even if he couldn’t have articulated why a scatter plot of baby urine was funnier than a heat map of it.

Ryland’s gaze swung across the table and settled on him, unblinking. “Cassian, the sticker placement follows a modified polar coordinate system, where Max’s navel serves as the origin point…”

Cassian’s shoulder pressed into Colin’s arm. Colin’s hand found his knee under the table and rested there.

Stephen was acting out the moment the stream hit Ryland’s glasses, and the table had dissolved into collective hysteria, everyone laughing at each other’s laughter rather than at the original joke, so that when Cassian pushed his chair back, nobody noticed.

The family’s attention was a closed circuit, feeding back on itself, and slipping out of it was as simple as being the one person in the room who wasn’t a Huxley or a significant other.

He climbed the stairs in his socks, his feet silent on the thick carpet that swallowed every sound in this house. The landing was dim, the overhead light off, and the door to the nursery stood ajar by a few inches, letting a narrow band of warm light fall across the hallway floor from the nightlight inside.

Cassian eased the door open and stepped through.

Two Moses baskets sat side by side beneath the window, the curtains drawn against the July evening. The nightlight on the dresser cast everything in a low amber glow that softened the edges of the furniture and made the room feel smaller than it was.

Max was on his back with his fists up by his ears, his mouth open. Tala lay on her side with her knees drawn up. One arm had worked its way free of the blanket, her hand splayed open against the basket’s lining, her fingers so small that Cassian could have covered all five of them with his thumb.

He crouched between the two baskets and checked Max first. His blanket had ridden up and bunched beneath his chin, leaving his feet exposed, so Cassian drew it down and tucked the edges around his legs, smoothing the fabric flat. He moved slowly because rushed hands woke babies.

Max’s mouth worked in his sleep, his lips pursing and releasing around nothing.

Cassian moved to Tala. Her blanket was fine, but her shirt had rucked up at the back, exposing a strip of bare skin above her nappy. Cassian tugged the fabric down with two fingers, careful not to shift her.

He went to sit in the rocking chair by the window. The cushion was deep enough that his knees came up higher than his hips, and the chair moved beneath him whenever he repositioned himself.