Chapter 197: THE BABY SHOWER

SERAPHINA'S POV

Lyanna planned it in four days, which for Lyanna was actually restraint.

She presented it as a done deal on a Tuesday morning. She materialized from the kitchen holding a color swatch and a list in each hand, with a note stating the party was going to be on Saturday with a small guestlist, with a few of our closest friends.

Anyone who had a problem with that was going to have to take it up with someone who cared about their objection, and it was damn sure not her.

"You're not asking," I said.

"I'm informing," she said. "There's a difference."

"There isn't really."

"There is if I say there is."

I looked at the list. Seven names, all of them people who'd been through enough of the last year to have earned their place in a room celebrating anything. Diane. Elena. Two women from my life before everything that Lyanna had apparently tracked down and contacted without mentioning it. Catherine, her name written in Lyanna's handwriting with the specific neat care she reserves for things she's treating as significant. And Roan, which made me look up.

"Roan," I said.

"He held Marcus in a parking lot," Lyanna said. "He gets an invitation."

I didn't argue with that.

The house was transformed by Saturday in the way houses are transformed by Lyanna, that is, completely and rather thoroughly.

Warmth and color seeped into rooms that had been perfectly useful and rather bland for months, as if the house always had the potential for that and just waited for the person to release it.

Damon wandered around it, making that expression of his that was my favorite on his face, when something occurs in his life he didn’t plan and has opted to appreciate, regardless.

Marcus had strong feelings about literally everything.

His opinions started forming more or less at the time of his birth, growing every week in terms of scope and demanding nature. And today they were that it was far too warm in this room and something should be done about it and the medium in which he expressed this and all opinions is loud, very clear and not up for negotiation. Intense wailing.

Lyanna took him before I'd finished apologising on his behalf and walked him in slow circles near the window with the focused competence of a woman who had decided she was going to be exceptional at this thing and had practised accordingly.

Catherine showed up at eleven, the time I’d asked her to show up, which was half an hour before everyone else was going to show up because I’d wanted her to have some time to find her bearings in the house before all the people she didn’t know showed up and her curiosity about her visit started pestering her from the front porch.

She looked healthier than when I’d last seen her which was at the hospital, which wasn't a high-bar, but healthy on a deeper level than merely epidermal. There was an ease around her eyes I hadn’t seen for the last many months.

She held Marcus for a long time after Lyanna relinquished him, and I saw her turn him in her arms as I had seen her turn him in the hospital room; and saw in her face the look of one discovering an article of value she had never thought missing before finding it exactly where she had left it.

"He's grown," she said.

"He has opinions now," I said.

"Good," she said. "He should."

The guests arrived in the hour that followed. The room filled with the warmth of people who liked each other and were glad to be somewhere that felt safe, which was not something I'd taken for granted in a long time and didn't take for granted now.

Elena was silent, but present, in the quiet, present way that she had been since she volunteered for the decoy spot. She wasn't withdrawn, but just conserved, the particular brand of controlled energy that belongs to a person who has decided that this room is worth being in and is being in it according to her own rules.

She held Marcus once, briefly, with the same measured quality as someone carrying something they would not try to pretend was hers.

Marcus considered her with the direct, mildly resentful regard that he gave anyone unfamiliar and then determined she was fine and then slept on her shoulder, which she received with an expression somewhere between surprise and something much warmer.

The afternoon was the best few hours I'd had in longer than I could easily remember.

And then the doorbell rang.

Lyanna, who had been closest to the door, walked to open it and I heard the click of the latch and then a pause. And then Lyanna saying something from where I was I couldn’t make out, in a voice that contained a tone that I’ve come to recognise, the flat tone when the social processing in her head has hit something it’s unprepared for and is buffering.

Then another voice spoke from the doorway.

One that I hadn’t heard in a long time. One that I always connected with a court and a witness stand and a carefully practiced testimony that was so flawless, the practice didn't show.

"I'm not here to cause any trouble," Lena said, from the doorway. "I just wanted to give her something. For the baby."

She was holding a wrapped gift, both hands visible, the careful body language of someone who has thought about how they were going to stand in this doorway and has made deliberate choices accordingly.

I looked at Damon.

He was already standing, had been standing since the doorbell, the instinct running faster than anything conscious, and his face had the expression it has when he's assessing a threat and hasn't finished assessing.

"She wasn't on the list," Lyanna said, to the room, not to Lena specifically. "She was definitely not on the list."

Lena looked at me directly, past Lyanna, past Damon, straight at me.

"Five minutes," she said. "That's all I'm asking for."