Chapter 297 She Stays
ADRIANA
Elijah was in the chair by the window with his phone in his hand, not really looking at it, and Lana was in her cot between us the way she had been all night.
I had closed my eyes again and then something at the edge of my vision made them open.
Lana’s hand was moving.
Not a twitch, not the involuntary small movements that bodies made during sleep. A deliberate, slow uncurling of her fingers.
I sat up instantly.
“Elijah.”
He looked up from his phone immediately. Something in my voice had communicated everything before I said another word.
“Her hand,” I said.
He was on his feet and at the cot in the same motion, looking down at her, and I was beside him a second later and we both stood over her and watched her hand open and close slowly, the fingers spreading like something waking up from a very long distance.
“Get the doctor,” I said.
He was already moving toward the door.
I didn’t go with him. I couldn’t leave the room, couldn’t take my eyes off her, because what if the moment I turned away was the moment her eyes opened and she was alone. So I stood at the cot and I talked to her the way I had been talking to her for days, low and continuous, telling her she was home, that her brothers had made her a sign, that Lorain had drawn her a picture, that the twins had been asking about her every single hour and driving everyone slightly mad with it, which she was going to love when she was old enough to understand.
And her eyes opened.
Slowly, with the enormous effort of something very small doing something very difficult, her eyelids came up and she looked at the ceiling and then her gaze moved and found my face and stayed there.
I made a sound I couldn’t control. Something that wasn’t a word.
Elijah came back through the door with the doctor and two nurses and I stepped back to let them reach her and stood against the wall with my hand pressed over my mouth watching them work, watching the doctor check her responses and her reflexes and the things I didn’t fully understand, watching Lana’s eyes track movement and find light and blink against it with the slow deliberateness of something reorienting.
“She’s fully responsive,” the doctor said, turning to us. “Her vitals look good. She’s tired and she’s going to need time to recover her strength, but she’s awake and she’s with us.”
“How is her brain function?” I asked. “You can tell now, right?”
“The responsiveness I’m seeing is not consistent with neurological damage.” He said it carefully but clearly. “I want to run one more assessment in the morning to confirm, but what I’m looking at right now gives me significant reason for optimism.”
I crossed back to the cot and picked her up.
She was lighter than I remembered. Days of inadequate feeding and cold and whatever they had put her through had taken something from her, and the fury of that sat in my chest alongside the relief, and I held both at the same time while I held her.
“Doctor,” I said, without looking up from her face. “When can I take her home?”
“We’ll do the morning assessment and if it comes back as I expect, you can leave by midmorning.” He paused. “She’ll need close monitoring for the next week. Breast feed her exclusively. And if anything seems off — anything at all — you bring her straight back.”
We thanked him. The nurses made their notes and checked everything once more and then left us alone in the room, and Elijah and I stood side by side over the cot where Lana was now looking between us with the particular expression of a baby who had no context for anything that had happened but was registering the emotional temperature of the room around her.
“Hey, baby,” Elijah said softly, looking down at her. “There you are.”
I didn’t trust my voice for a moment. I just watched her look at him. And I did that the whole night.
In the morning, the assessment came back clear. The doctor handed us a bag of medications with instructions, told us the things to watch for, and then stood back and let us take our daughter home.
Elijah carried the bags. I carried Lana.
She fell asleep in the car. She fell asleep like someone who had decided that the crisis was resolved and she was now going to catch up on the rest she was owed, and her head tipped against my arm and her breathing settled into something even and deep, and I looked out the window at the morning going past and felt something in me slowly begin to unknot.
At home I took her directly to the bathroom. I didn’t know the last time she had been properly bathed, didn’t know what had been done to her or not done for her during the days she was gone, and I needed to know that every part of her was clean and accounted for. I ran warm water and checked the temperature three times and washed her slowly and thoroughly, her hair and her small hands and behind her ears, talking to her the whole time in the low continuous way I always had. She was alert enough to look at me while I did it. Not fussy — just watching, her eyes following my face.
Elijah had laid her clothes out on the bed when I brought her back into the room. He was sitting in the chair, elbows on his knees, not doing anything in particular, and I recognized the expression he was wearing — it was the expression he wore when he was feeling something too large to move around and was waiting for it to settle into something he could work with.
I dressed Lana and fed her and rocked her to sleep in the quiet of the room, and Elijah watched without saying anything, and when I finally placed her in the cot I stood over her for a long moment and just looked at her sleeping face.
“She looks so small,” Elijah said, from behind me. “She’s so beautiful. I keep forgetting, in the middle of all of it, how completely extraordinary she is.”
I turned and looked at him.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said. “About her safety. And what keeps happening.” He met my eyes. “What if we send her somewhere else for a while? Somewhere safe. Damien and Nancy’s. She would be loved and she would be far enough from here that whoever has been targeting her can’t reach her.”
I stared at him for a long moment.
“Say that again,” I said.
“Adriana—”
“Say it again, so I’m sure I heard correctly.”
“I’m trying to protect her. Every time she’s been in danger, she’s been here, in this house, where people have access—”
“She is a newborn,” I said. My voice came out very controlled. “She has been home for three hours. And you want to send her away.” I looked at him. “To someone else’s house. To be raised by someone else.”
“Not raised. Just temporarily—”
“No.” The word landed with a finality that ended whatever he was about to say next. “I will not send my daughter away. Not to Damien and Nancy, who I love, not to anyone. She stays in this house. We fix the security, we fix the access, we find whoever did this and we deal with them.” I held his gaze. “But she stays with me. That is not a discussion.”
Elijah was quiet for a moment. Then he nodded, not the nod of someone who had been beaten in an argument but of someone who had needed to voice the fear and had done so and now accepted the outcome.
“Okay,” he said. “She stays.”
“She stays,” I confirmed.
We looked at her together for a long moment, and then I went to bed because my body had finally run out of everything it had been running on.