Chapter 254 The Next Minute

Chapter 254 The Next Minute
APRIL'S POV

Eleven people in my mother's house, and a bag by the front door that had been packed since March. She'd repacked it twice — the second time swapping out a book I was never going to read for a phone charger that didn't fit anything anybody owned.

Two of the eleven were leaving in nine days, Ethan first and Ares four behind him, and my mother had cooked tonight like feeding two grown men well enough now could hold them here until Christmas.

Those stairs took one at a time these days, a hand on the rail the whole way down. Asher was already at the bottom before I was halfway.

"I can walk downstairs."

"I'm aware." He put his hand out anyway. "Take it or don't."

I took it.

The house was loud in a way it hadn't managed since before October. My father worked a bottle of wine he'd been promising people for months, while Asher's stepmother and mine washed dishes that weren't dirty.

Ares's father stood in the corner of the kitchen with a glass in his hand, out of the office and out of a suit, looking nine years younger than the man I remembered. Ethan and Ares were fighting over a pan. I stood in the doorway a minute and just let it all wash over me.

At the table, Asher moved the dish I was reaching for two inches, without a word about it.

"What."

"Nothing," I said, and found his hand under the table for a second.

Between the plates and the second round of food, somebody asked whether the baby would play hockey.

"Not until it can decide for itself."

"That's a wasted childhood," Ares said.

"You are not teaching my sister's baby hockey," Ethan told him.

"I'm the only one at this table qualified to."

"You are the only one at this table who has been to a hospital about his own face."

That set me laughing hard enough my whole front locked, my hand landing over it before I'd even decided to move it. Asher's fork was down inside a second.

"All right?"

"Pressure. That's all."

He watched me three seconds longer than a person needs to, then let it go.

My father stood up before the plates were cleared, which is early for him — early enough it stopped the whole room. No speech.

Just that this house had had a hard year, that everyone at the table had carried a piece of it, and that in nine days two of them would be on planes — he wanted the room to notice, first, that they'd come home at all.

Then he said he was proud of every person sitting there, and dropped back into his chair fast, before anybody could look at him too long.

The baby moved while he was talking. I said something to it under my breath that's staying between us. Asher heard it. He didn't turn his head and he didn't say anything. Under the table, his hand found mine.

The laughing started up again, and I was reaching for my glass when the whole front of me closed like a fist. My hand stopped where it was, out over the table.

"April."

"Give me a second."

Then it came again, harder, and something happened that I'd been told about in a leaflet and hadn't believed a word of.

"Mom."

"What's wrong—"

"I think that was a contraction," I said, "and I think my water just broke at your table."

Eleven people went completely silent in a room with the music still on.

Somebody should have photographed Ethan's face. Ares looked at Asher. Renata was already dragging chairs clear, and Asher's mother lifted two glasses off the table before anyone knocked them over. Asher crouched down beside my chair, and he didn't shout for anybody.

"How far apart."

"I wasn't timing them. I was eating."

My father was already patting his pockets for a phone that was in his hand.

"Tom.” mom yelled at him

"I'm getting the car."

"You're holding the phone, Tom."

"Nobody panic," Ethan announced, to a room in which he was the only person panicking.

"You're panicking," Ares told him.

"I'm the uncle. Panicking is the whole role."

The next one folded me over the arm of the chair, and I took Asher's forearm with both hands. He dropped down in front of me at eye level.

"Look at me."

I looked at him.

"Breathe with me."

Four breaths of that. "It isn't helping."

"Okay," he said, and kept doing it anyway, right there in front of me, until my breathing gave up and went where his was.

That wasn't the man who'd been in this house in November. That man would have had four solutions ready and a website already open. My mother had the bag off the floor before anyone asked. Ethan had the front door and the lights.

Ares moved my grandmother's chair out of the hallway with one hand, like it weighed nothing. Asher loaded me into the back of the car and climbed in beside me; my parents took the other one.

Another one hit on the road, and my nails went straight through the skin on the back of his hand.

"Tell me it's nearly over."

"It's nearly over."

"That is not something you know."

"No," Asher said. "But I'm here and I'm not moving."

The hospital is mostly noise to me now — a woman with cold hands, a corridor light that wouldn't stop flickering, my mother appearing and disappearing, my father working the family's phone calls from a stairwell because he couldn't sit still. Somewhere in the middle of it I told Asher I couldn't do it.

Nothing out of him about how I could. He offered me something smaller instead.

"Then we do the next minute," he said.

"Just one."

"One minute."

That minute got done. Then another. That's how the whole night got done — in minutes, with a man beside my bed who'd stopped offering me anything but the next sixty seconds.

By the end of it I was frightened at a level I hadn't said out loud to anybody, him included.

"I can't."

Asher moved the hair off my forehead with two fingers.

"You don't have to be brave with me," he said. "You don't have to make this easy for anybody in this room."

So I stopped trying to. I swore at him. He didn't go anywhere, and he took all of it.

Then a cry cut through that room and everything else went still. Somebody laid her on my chest — furious, wet, roughly the size of a loaf of bread, a full head of dark hair already on her. Against my skin she stopped crying inside eight seconds.

"It's a girl," somebody said, from somewhere.

Asher stood beside the bed with both hands at his sides, like somebody had told him not to touch anything in the room.

"You can hold her."

"I don't want to—"

"Asher."

One finger went against her hand. Her whole fist closed around it. Out of him came a sound nobody in this family has ever heard.

"Hi," he said. His voice went completely. "I'm your dad."

Then he bent and rested his mouth against my forehead and stayed there a while.

"Thank you."

"We did it."

"No." He was looking at her. "You did."

"We did it," I said.

Somebody dimmed the room. My mother stepped in, cried, and left again to do it properly outside. She was still in my arms when the phone started on the tray table at ten to five in the morning.

Ruiz. Three words and a name.

One read was enough. Then I turned it face down on the tray and put my hand back where it had been.

"Who is it," Asher said. Close watching and no action on it — that's how he does it now.

"They found the key register," I said. "There's one signature in it for that corridor."

"April."

"Warren Pike."