The 23rd Deletion Bride novel · Chapter 23 of 24
Chapter 23: Six Weeks
The room stayed silent for a long, terrible time.
Then, from somewhere down the corridor, a thin furious wail came through the closed doors.
Cullen's hand tightened on mine until it hurt.
"That's her," I said. "That's her."
"That's her."
We were both crying.
A nurse put her head in, out of breath, smiling.
"She's breathing on her own. Four pounds nine ounces, which is huge for thirty-four weeks. She's going to the little ones' unit for a few days, to be watched."
"Go with her," I said to Cullen.
"Linnea, I'm not leaving you."
"She shouldn't be alone for a minute. Go."
He kissed my forehead hard and went at a run.
An hour later he came back and held up his phone.
On the screen was a baby the size of his two hands, in a clear box, with a knitted cap over a dark fuzz of hair.
One fist was clenched under her chin.
"She frowns," he said.
"She frowns like my father."
"The nurse says she has his temper, too."
I laughed until a stitch pulled, and then I just looked at her.
"Harbor," I said.
"What?"
"Her name. After my father."
Cullen didn't say anything for a while.
"He'd have been unbearable about it," he said at last, and wiped his face with the back of his wrist.
At dawn they wheeled me down to the little ones' unit in a chair.
At the end of the corridor, in front of the glass, a man in a charcoal suit stood alone.
He had been told he could look for one minute, with a nurse beside him, because I had said so.
He stood very straight, with both palms against the window.
I stopped the chair a long way back.
He did not turn.
When the minute was up, the nurse touched his sleeve.
He took his hands off the glass and looked, finally, along the corridor at me.
He nodded, once.
Then he walked to the elevator, and I let him go.
She came home three weeks later, in a car seat bigger than she was.
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