Chapter 107: Three Months Later

Chapter 107: Three Months Later
Amelia's POV

Sarah cried at exactly four in the morning every single night without fail, and Clara waited until Sarah stopped and then started, like they'd worked out a system between them in the womb and were committed to it.

Grayson had figured this out in the second week and started setting an alarm for three fifty-five so he could be ready, which was such a Grayson thing to do, to treat a newborn's sleep schedule like a logistics problem to be optimised, and I loved him for it completely.

This particular morning I was already awake before the alarm because I'd been awake since three, which was the new normal, and I lay there listening to the monitor and when Sarah started I was already sitting up and Grayson was already moving and we did the thing we'd gotten efficient at, me taking Sarah, him taking Clara, meeting in the middle of the living room at four AM in the particular companionable exhaustion of two people keeping two small people alive together.

"She has your stubborn face," Grayson said, looking at Sarah who was eating with the focused determination of someone who had been waiting a very long time for this and was going to take full advantage.

"She has your jaw," I said.

"She has both our worst qualities," he said, and there was nothing but warmth in it.

Clara had gone back to sleep in his arms the way she always did, easier than her sister, more willing to be still, and he sat in the chair with her and watched me feed Sarah and we didn't talk much because we were tired and it was four in the morning and talking wasn't what was needed, just being in the same room doing the same thing was enough.

Three months had rearranged everything and nothing at the same time.

The house was different now, louder and more cluttered and smelling like the specific combination of things that meant babies lived there, and there were two small humans in it who didn't care about Hayes International or share prices or any of the things that had felt so enormous six months ago, they just cared about eating and sleeping and occasionally being held by their aunt Elena who came over four times a week and had a particular talent for getting Clara to laugh that nobody else had figured out yet.

Thomas had met them three weeks ago.

He'd come on a Sunday afternoon and sat in our living room and held them one at a time with very careful hands, like someone handling things they understood were more fragile than they looked, and he'd been quieter than I'd ever seen him and when he gave Clara back he looked at me and said "she looks like Sarah" meaning my mother, and I said "I know" and he said nothing else for a while and I let the silence be what it was.

It wasn't forgiveness exactly, what was between Thomas and me, it was something more practical than that, a decision to be in each other's lives because the alternative cost more than either of us was willing to pay, and we were both working within that with the particular carefulness of people who understood what was at stake.

Daniel had come the same Sunday, which in retrospect was a lot of Raine family for one afternoon, but it had actually been fine, better than fine, because Daniel and Elena had started texting regularly and had apparently developed a friendship that had nothing to do with Amelia or genetics and everything to do with the fact that they were both quietly funny and interested in the same things, and watching them bicker affectionately about something design-related across the living room while Thomas held his granddaughters for the first time was one of the stranger and more beautiful afternoons I'd experienced in a long time.

Grayson ran Hayes International the way he'd always been meant to, cleanly and without the years of interference that had made it complicated, and the company was doing well in the straightforward way companies do when the person running them actually knows what they're doing and isn't fighting a war on three fronts simultaneously, and I heard him talk about it differently now, not with the defensive energy of someone protecting something under siege but with the particular satisfaction of someone building.

I'd gone back to writing, properly, not just the article but new work, pitches and features and the beginnings of something longer that I wasn't ready to talk about yet but that was sitting in a document on my laptop taking shape slowly in the hours when the girls were asleep and the house was quiet.

Sarah finished eating and went loose and heavy in my arms the way they did when they were finally done and I held her against my shoulder and looked at Grayson across the room and he looked back and we were both so tired and so entirely exactly where we were supposed to be.

"I've been thinking," he said, and his voice was low because Clara was asleep on him.

"About what," I said.

"About the house," he said. "We talked about finding somewhere new. Somewhere we picked together."

"I remember," I said.

"I found somewhere," he said, and something in his voice made me look at him more carefully. "I didn't mean to, I was doing something else and an agent sent it over and I looked at it and I think you should see it."

"When," I said.

"Whenever you're ready," he said. "No rush."

"Show me now," I said, because it was four in the morning and Sarah was almost asleep and there was nothing else pressing.

He picked up his phone carefully with one hand so as not to disturb Clara and pulled up the listing and held the screen toward me and I looked at it in the dim room, a house with a garden big enough for children to actually run in and a light-filled kitchen and enough rooms for the life we were building, and I looked at it for a long time.

"Yes," I said.

He looked at me. "You barely looked at it."

"I looked enough," I said. "Yes."

He put the phone down and the room went quiet again except for the small sounds of two sleeping babies and the city outside doing its thing, and after a moment he said "your mother would have liked this house" and I said "she would have said the garden needed work" and he said "she would have been right" and I said "she always was."

Elena came over the next morning with coffee and a notebook she pushed across the kitchen table toward me without explaining, and I picked it up and opened the front cover and read what she'd written inside in her handwriting.

Your next story starts here.

I looked at her across the table and she raised her coffee cup and I laughed and turned to the first blank page.