CHAPTER 178: The Last Weeks

POV: Selene Castellano

Thirty five weeks arrived on a Tuesday and Dr. Okafor said the words Selene had been waiting for since January.

“She could come any time now and we wouldn’t stop her.”

Selene sat on the examination table and felt something shift in her chest that was equal parts terror and relief and something else she didn’t have a word for yet. Avalon was beside her in the chair he always took, the one slightly too small for him, and he was very still in the way he got when something significant was landing and he needed a moment to receive it properly.

“Any time,” he said.

“Any time,” Dr Okafor confirmed. “She’s positioned well. Her lungs are developed and her weight is good.” She looked at Selene. “You’ve done everything right. Both of you.”

Walking back to the car afterward Selene stopped on the pavement without deciding to. Avalon stopped beside her. The city moved around them indifferently the way it always did and she stood in the middle of it and thought about a year ago, about a woman standing at a kitchen counter reading a will that had rearranged everything, about the ten years before that and the ten years before that and all the impossible things that had had to happen in exactly the right order to produce this moment on this pavement at thirty five weeks with this man beside her.

“Any time,” she said quietly.

“Any time,” he agreed.

She took his hand and they walked to the car and neither of them said anything else because nothing else needed saying.

He started doing things without being asked. That was what she noticed first.

Small things. The kind that told you more about a person than any declaration could.

He moved everything she might need from the higher shelves to the lower ones without commenting on it. He started tracking the hospital bag’s location with the vigilance of someone who had run the mental simulation enough times to know that the difference between thirty seconds and three minutes mattered. He learned, finally properly, to make the specific tea she wanted at specific times of day, the ginger one in the mornings, the chamomile in the evenings  and he made it without being asked, which was the whole point, because the asking was its own kind of exhaustion.

One evening she walked into the nursery and found him sitting in the chair. Just sitting in the room in the dark with the door slightly open and the city light coming through the window he’d chosen for the morning light.

She stood in the doorway for a moment.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Getting used to it,” he said.

“To what?”

“To her being here,” he said. “I come in sometimes and just sit. So the room feels like somewhere she’s expected rather than somewhere she’s theoretical.”

Selene leaned against the doorframe and looked at her husband sitting in the dark in their daughter’s room doing the most quietly extraordinary thing she’d ever seen him do, and she thought about the man who had looked at her like a ghost from the past in the first week of their marriage, and she thought about the deposition room, and the kitchen floor, and the warehouse, and all the versions of both of them that had existed before they’d become the people capable of this moment, and she felt something so large and uncomplicated move through her that she didn’t try to name it or contain it. She just stood in the doorway and let it be.

“She knows she’s expected,” Selene said. “Trust me.”

He looked at her from the chair. “How do you know?”

“Because she’s been kicking me for thirteen weeks,” Selene said. “She’s not theoretical. She’s extremely opinionated and she’s on her way.”

He almost smiled. The real one. The one that reached his eyes and stayed there a moment longer than necessary.

“Go to bed,” he said. “I’ll be there.”

“Don’t stay too long,” she said.

“I won’t,” he said.

She went to bed and lay in the dark and listened to the apartment’s quiet and thought about him in the green room getting used to a person who was almost here, and she closed her eyes and felt Elena move and said goodnight to both of them simultaneously.

Maya came by on a Thursday with food she didn’t need to bring and opinions about the hospital bag she absolutely needed to share.

“You don’t have enough snacks,” Maya said, going through it with the focused authority of someone who had watched every birth preparation video available.

“I have snacks,” Selene said.

“You have three granola bars and what appears to be a single apple,” Maya said. “That’s not snacks. That’s an apology for snacks.”

“Avalon packed the snacks,” Selene said.

Maya looked at Avalon.

“She told me to pack snacks,” Avalon said.

“She told you to pack snacks and you packed three granola bars,” Maya said.

“They’re good granola bars,” he said.

“Avalon,” Maya said. “You are a billionaire. The snacks should reflect that.”

“The snacks are perfectly adequate,” he said.

“The snacks,” Maya said, “are an embarrassment.” She took out her phone and started a list with the energy of someone who had found their purpose. “I’m going to the store. I’ll be back in forty minutes. Nobody should touch the bag.”

She left and the door closed behind her.

Selene looked at Avalon across the apartment.

“She’s okay,” Avalon said quietly.

“She’s Maya,” Selene said. “She’s channeling it into snacks.”

“Is that healthy?” he asked.

“Completely,” she said. “Let her fix the snacks.”

He looked at the hospital bag.

“The granola bars are good,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “Don’t tell Maya that.”

That night she lay awake later than usual, Elena restless, the two of them in the dark having a conversation that had no words in it. She thought about Esperanza Reyes holding up the land trust document. About Edward Pierce saying I knew what I was doing. About Patricia Ruiz sitting in a circle and saying things her father should have said. About Gloria Reyes’s arm around her mother’s shoulders. About Kevin Walsh outside the room with the expression of a man who had arrived at something he’d been walking toward for years.

She thought about Maya packing a hypothetical bag for Accra and getting in the car anyway. About Kofi and the peace lily and choosing everything specifically. About Amara saying the foundation was stronger for having been tested. About Nadia leaving London for a role that paid less and meant more. About James and his daughter and drinks that weren’t meetings. About Dr. Adeyemi in a corridor holding a baby who needed holding.

She thought about Nene writing her question in the margins of board notes fifteen years ago and setting aside money and writing a will and trusting that the right hands would come.

She put her hand on her stomach.

“All of that is yours,” she said quietly to Elena. “Everything they built and everything it cost them and everything it became. You’re arriving into the middle of all of it and you’re going to have to figure out what to do with that inheritance the same way everyone does.” She paused. “But you won’t figure it out alone. That’s the difference. That’s what they got right.”

Elena moved under her hand. Slow and certain. The specific communication of someone who was ready.

Selene closed her eyes.

Slept.

At 3:47 AM on a Friday in August she woke up and knew.

She lay still for exactly thirty seconds then she turned to Avalon.

“Avalon,” she said.

He was awake immediately. Fully awake, the way he’d been waking for weeks, as if his body had decided sleep was a suggestion rather than a commitment for the duration.

“Yes,” he said.

“It’s time,” she said.

He was already moving.