Sleeping

The baby was finally sleeping.

I hadn’t named him.

Not yet.

Somehow, between the blood and the gunfire, between Daria’s shadow and Milo’s endless wars, the space for something as sacred as a name had been lost.

Like it had no room to bloom in all this wreckage.

Like naming him would make him real,and real things could be taken.

His breath whispered against Milo’s shirt, the one I’d pulled from the bathroom floor in a panic,torn and smoke-drenched, still stained with the ghost of a gunfight. It smelled like adrenaline, like aftershave and steel. Like him.

I held the child tighter, as if his chest against mine could silence the chaos in my bones. But my body was unraveling, inch by inch.

My eyelids were sandpaper. My legs trembled beneath me. The blood in my veins dragged like syrup, and still,still,I didn’t lie down. Couldn’t.

My gaze was fixed on the door.

That hollow space where Daria had stood not long ago, her fingers grazing my child’s head like it meant something.

And then she wa