Chapter 19: Not Yet

On the third day the nurse asked again.

"Skin-to-skin is the best thing for him," she said, very gently, to Maxim. "Even ten minutes."

He stood at the incubator with his hands behind his back.

"Not today," he said.

"Mr. Kovalev..."

"Not yet," I said.

Both of them looked at me.

I was in a wheelchair beside the box, in a hospital gown and Maxim's gray sweater.

The unit was cold, and my own clothes were still in a bag.

"He'll do it when he's ready," I said. "Please don't make him say why."

The nurse looked at Maxim, then at me, and she nodded and went on to her next baby.

Maxim didn't move.

His eyes were on Luca's chest, rising and falling under the tape.

"I'm not refusing him," he said.

"I know."

"I stand here forty times a day and I count his breaths. I can't stop. If I touched him and I were wrong..."

"You wouldn't be wrong."

"I was wrong once, Elena."

He said it very quietly.

"I put her down at six and I told myself the sound meant she was fine."

"You listened to her breathe for eleven weeks, and you were right to trust it," I said. "It wasn't your fault."

"I know that. I've known it for six years. It doesn't help."

"Then it won't help today either," I said. "So we'll stand here."

I put my hand on his, on the cold edge of the incubator.

We stood there, the three of us, until the evening feed.

Nonna had gone back to Scranton for one night.

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Said Children Were a Mistake, So I Ran With His Baby from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.