Chapter 109: Seven in the Morning

Victor's POV

Franklin was sitting in the corridor outside the delivery room when I came out for water.

He stood the moment he saw me. "Any news?"

"Not yet." I leaned against the wall beside the dispenser. "She's doing well. The team is in position."

"And you?"

I poured the water and drank it. "Ask me in an hour."

He handed me a second cup before I could fill one for myself. He must have been holding it ready. That was Franklin, always two steps ahead of a moment that hadn't arrived yet, and for most of their shared history, doing nothing with that skill except using it to stay out of the way. He was trying to use it differently now. I could see him trying.

"What did Moses send you this morning?" I said. "The early message."

"He updated me on the board member investigation." Franklin sat back against the wall. "The payment trace is moving. He expects a name by tonight."

"Good."

"Victor." He looked at me sideways. "Are you going to tell me what Moses sent you before Shaznay went into prep?"

I looked at the cup. "Later."

"All right." He didn't push. That was new too.

The door opened and a nurse came out with a chart, not for us, and went down the hall without looking our way. I watched the door swing shut.

"She's going to want to go to Evelyn," I said.

"I know."

"After the delivery, during recovery, she will find a way to get to that facility if I don't take her myself."

Franklin considered that. "So take her yourself."

"I'm not letting her into a detention medical unit three days after giving birth."

"Victor." He turned to face me properly. "When have you ever successfully prevented Shaznay from doing something she had already decided to do?"

I thought about that. The campus situation. The argument about the security team. The night she walked into Clara's room when the doctor had said to rest.

"Never," I said.

"So your options are to take her, or to spend her recovery fighting a battle you've already lost." He picked up the coffee cup he'd set on the floor beside the chair. "Take her. Go with her. Wait outside the door."

The delivery room nurse put her head into the corridor. "Mr. Emmanuel. We're ready for you."

I went in.

The room was bright, the way rooms always are when something significant is about to happen, as if the light has been asked to pay full attention. Shaznay was on the bed with the equipment running around her, her hair pulled back, her jaw set in the exact way it got when she was in pain and had decided not to speak about it.

"You took your time," she said.

"Franklin was in the corridor." I went to her side and took her hand. "He sends something that is not quite a prayer and not quite a warning."

She almost smiled. "That sounds right."

The doctor gave us the full rundown: both positions good, timeline clear, team ready. He asked Shaznay if she had questions. She asked one: "Which one is lower?"

"The boy," the doctor said.

She nodded. That was all.

I held her hand and I talked to her through the hard parts. I told her about Franklin sitting in the corridor before the sun was properly up. I told her Moses had sent four separate updates since five in the morning. I told her Samuel had messaged from his floor: "Tell her she is stronger than she knows. Tell her I know because I have known her all her life."

Shaznay's eyes went wet at the edges when I read that out. She pulled it back before it went further.

"He always says things at the exact right moment," she said.

"He's your father," I said. "He's been practicing."

She gripped my hand tighter and the room went into its own rhythm, and I did what I'd learned to do beside her: I stayed present and I stayed quiet and I let her be exactly where she was without trying to move her somewhere easier.

The boy arrived at seven forty-one.

He was loud about it. He came out announcing himself in a way that filled every corner of that bright room, and something moved through me that had no name I could locate in any language I'd been taught. Not pride, not relief, not joy, though all three were somewhere inside it. Something more basic than any of them. Something that started before words.

The nurse put him against Shaznay's chest and Shaznay looked at him and said nothing for a full ten seconds. Then she said: "He has your jaw."

"He has your lungs," I said.

She laughed and then stopped because of the pain, and held my hand tighter, and the doctor said: "We're moving to the second position. You're doing everything correctly."

I watched the monitor beside the bed. For four minutes, the readings were steady. Shaznay breathed. I breathed. The room was focused and quiet in the particular way that medical rooms get when the people inside them know exactly what they're doing.

Then, on the fifth minute, the reading on the second monitor jumped.

The doctor's voice changed. Not louder. Not sharp with alarm. But different