Chapter 220 I Want to See Him
ADRIANA
I'd told Hazel to clear my schedule before she even had a chance to tell me what was on it. She'd paused, looked at me, and then nodded without a word, which was how I knew she thought it was the right call even though she'd never say so directly.
Today was for my children. That was the full plan.
The twins had woken up at an hour that should not be legal and had been operating at full volume ever since. By the time I came downstairs, Elijah Junior had already recruited Liam into some kind of scheme involving the back garden, three footballs, and a hypothesis about aerodynamics that I was fairly certain he'd made up entirely. Lorain was at the kitchen table with a glass of juice and what appeared to be a very formal handwritten agenda.
"What is that?" I asked, sitting down beside her.
She slid it across the table to me. It was a list. Eight items, numbered, written in her precise, careful handwriting with the seriousness of a five year old who had decided something was important.
I looked at her. "You wrote me an agenda."
"Leo said you have a lot of meetings," she said. "So I made one. So you'd know what we're doing today."
I read through it. Item three was a request for pancakes. Item six was something about needing help finding a book she'd lost. Item eight simply read: talk.
I folded it carefully and put it in my pocket. "This is the best agenda I've seen all week."
She nodded, satisfied, and returned to her juice.
Leo came down in the middle of all of this, assessed the situation in about four seconds, poured himself coffee like he'd been drinking it for years - he hadn't, or at least he wasn't supposed to - and sat down across from me. I chose not to comment on the coffee. He caught me choosing not to comment and had the grace to look slightly guilty about it.
"What are we doing today?" he asked.
"Whatever's on the agenda," I said, and handed him Lorain's list.
He read it. His mouth curved slightly at item eight. He handed it back without saying anything.
After breakfast, I took the twins and Lorain out to the grounds while the morning was still cool and the light was good. Lana had just woken up from her first nap of the day and I brought her out wrapped against my chest, her small face turned toward the sun with the vague, unfocused interest of someone encountering the world fresh. Her color was good. Her breathing was easy.
The doctor had called early to confirm the preliminary panels on the blood donor were clear and that he was moving forward. I'd thanked him and stood in the kitchen for a moment after hanging up, just breathing.
Good news. Two days in a row. It felt dangerous to trust it.
Elijah Junior found a football within thirty seconds of stepping outside and immediately began explaining another theory to his brother. Liam listened for approximately eight seconds before grabbing the ball and running with it, and the explanation dissolved into a chase that covered the entire length of the garden in under a minute. Lorain settled at the garden table and opened her sketchbook. She was drawing Lana. She'd been drawing Lana for weeks, different poses and expressions, each one more precise than the last.
I sat on the steps and held Lana and watched them and tried to remember the last time I'd done this. Just sat outside with nowhere I had to be and no one asking me for a decision.
It had been before. Before the attack, before the coma, before the six months of sitting in rooms full of men who looked at me like I'd wandered in by accident.
Lana made a small sound and I shifted her, pressed my lips to the top of her head. She smelled the way newborns smell, clean and soft and entirely themselves. She was getting bigger. Elijah hadn't seen her grow. He'd held her twice in the two weeks between her birth and the night everything fell apart, and now she was changing every week and he was missing all of it and there was nothing I could do about that except make sure he came back to something worth returning to.
"Mum."
Leo had come outside without me hearing him. He sat down on the step beside me, forearms resting on his knees, watching his brothers run each other ragged across the lawn. For a while he didn't say anything and neither did I. It was the comfortable kind of silence, the kind that didn't need filling.
Then, quietly, without looking at me: "I know which floor he's on."
I didn't react. I'd known this was coming. "I know."
"The guards have turned me away twice."
"I know that too."
He was quiet for another moment. Liam scored something and Elijah Junior disputed it loudly and the argument that followed was immediate and elaborate. Lorain looked up from her sketchbook, looked at her brothers, looked back down. Leo watched them with something steady and patient in his expression that made him look older than fifteen and younger at the same time.
"I'm not going to ask you to take me today," he said. "I just need you to know that I want to see him. When you're ready. I'm not going anywhere."
I looked at my son.
He looked back at me with his father's eyes and his father's calm and his father's particular way of saying exactly what he meant without pushing for more than he was owed, and something in my chest pulled tight and then released.
"Soon," I said. And I meant it this time in a way I hadn't the other times. "I promise."
He nodded. Looked back at the garden. Liam had apparently won the disputed point and was celebrating with a level of enthusiasm that Elijah Junior was refusing to acknowledge on principle.
"He's going to wake up," Leo said. Not a question. Not reassurance for my benefit. Just a statement, matter of fact, like he'd decided it and that was that.
I looked down at Lana, at her small face turned toward the warmth, and felt something that wasn't quite hope but was in the same territory.
"Yes," I said. "He is."