Twenty -four weeks and a question

Alexandria’s POV

The furniture arrived on a Monday.

A crib, a small dresser, a nursing chair in a fabric that was somewhere between grey and green and had taken me two weeks of looking online at two in the morning to decide on. Jamie had offered to handle the delivery logistics and I’d let him because organizing furniture delivery was genuinely not what I wanted to spend energy on at twenty-four weeks when everything from my lower back downward had developed opinions about how long I stood in one place.

I sat on the hallway floor outside the nursery with my back against the wall and watched two delivery men and Jamie navigate a flat-packed crib through a doorway that was almost but not quite wide enough. There was a moment of genuine tension when one corner caught the frame and Jamie said something low and precise that wasn’t quite a curse word and the delivery man looked at him and I pressed my lips together to keep from laughing.

They got it through.

The men left at noon. Jamie stood in the middle of the nursery surrounded by flat-packed boxes and instruction sheets and looked at it with the expression of a man who ran a billion dollar company and was now confronted with something that required an allen key and spatial reasoning.

“I can do this,” he said. To himself, mostly.

“I know you can,” I said from the doorway.

“You’re not going to help.”

“I’m twenty-four weeks pregnant and my back hurts.”

“Right.” He picked up the instruction sheet. Turned it over. Turned it back. “These are in four languages and none of them are useful.”

“Start with the crib,” I said. “It’s probably the most complicated so do it first while you still have energy.”

He looked at me. “You’ve assembled furniture before.”

“My mother and I assembled every piece of furniture in our house growing up,” I said. “My father left before he could be useful about things like that.”

Something moved through his expression. He looked back at the instruction sheet and I saw him file that away the way he filed things now — not as information to be used but as something about me that he wanted to understand.

He sat down on the floor with the pieces and started sorting.

I went and got two glasses of water and came back and sat in the doorway again and watched him work.

He was methodical about it in the way he was methodical about most things. Sorted all the pieces first, laid them in order, read the full instructions before starting rather than building as he went. I found this deeply characteristic and didn’t say so.

The crib took an hour and a half.

When it was done he stood up and looked at it standing in the corner of the green room and his face did something I’d been seeing more of lately — a kind of unguarded satisfaction, the expression of a person who had made something with their hands and felt the realness of it.

“It’s level?” I said.

He checked. “It’s level.”

“Good.” I shifted against the door frame. Twenty-four weeks was an exercise in finding positions that worked and abandoning them when they stopped. “The dresser will be faster. It’s simpler construction.”

He looked at me. “You’re coaching me through furniture assembly.”

“I’m being helpful.”

“You’re enjoying this.”

“A little,” I admitted.

He almost smiled. Picked up the next set of instructions.

By three in the afternoon the room had furniture in it.

It looked like a nursery. Not a finished one, there were things still to come — a small bookshelf, a rug, the mobile I’d been looking at but hadn’t ordered — but the bones of it were there and they were right. The crib in the corner, the dresser against the wall, the nursing chair by the window where the afternoon light came in and turned the green walls something warmer.

I stood in the middle of it.

Jamie stood beside me.

“It’s real,” I said. Same thing he’d said at the scan. It kept being the right thing to say.

“It’s real,” he said.

We stood there in the room for a moment. His shoulder was close to mine. Not touching. That particular proximity we’d developed, close enough to feel each other’s presence without requiring contact, letting the other person decide when and whether to close the distance.

I closed it.

I leaned my shoulder against his arm, just slightly, the minimum amount of contact, and felt him go very still the way he did when something caught him off guard in the good way.

He didn’t move.

Just stayed still and let it be what it was.

After a moment his arm shifted and came around my shoulders, slow and careful, a question in the movement rather than an assumption. I let him. We stood in the nursery with his arm around me and the green walls around us and the crib in the corner waiting for a girl we’d named Catherine Edith at eleven o’clock on a Wednesday night two weeks ago without planning to, the names just arriving together and being right.

“I need to ask you something,” he said.

“Okay.”

“And I need you to know that whatever you answer I’m not going to—” He stopped. Tried again. “There’s no wrong answer. I’m not asking to get a particular response.”

I looked up at him. “Ask.”

He was looking at the crib. At the room. At something slightly beyond what was in front of us.

“Are we going to be okay,” he said. “You and me. Not the baby, not the house, not the marriage as a functional unit.” He looked down at me. “You and me as people. Are we going to be okay.”

The question sat in the green room.

I thought about it the way it deserved to be thought about. Not reaching for reassurance or deflection. Not protecting him from the honest answer or protecting myself from the vulnerable one.

I thought about the suitcase and the hospital ward and the stepladder and the paint and his arm around me right now in the room that was becoming something for a girl who was going to need us both to have figured this out.

“I think we’re becoming okay,” I said. “I think that’s different from being okay but I think it’s real. And I think real is what I can offer you right now.”

He was quiet.

“Is that enough?” I asked.

He looked at me for a long moment with those blue eyes that I had been learning to read for months and had finally, finally started to understand.

“It’s more than I had,” he said. “It’s more than I made space for.” His arm tightened slightly around my shoulders. “It’s enough, Alexandria.”

I looked back at the crib.

At Catherine Edith’s crib.

At the green walls and the afternoon light and the man beside me who was still in the process of becoming someone worth staying for and was doing the work of it with more honesty than I’d thought him capable of.

I wasn’t there yet.

We weren’t there yet.

But the room was ready.

And we were still in it.

Together.

That was something.

That was actually something.