CHAPTER 179: Elena

POV: Avalon Pierce

He drove too fast again and Selene didn’t tell him to slow down because she was breathing through something that had taken all her attention and he understood that the only useful thing he could do right now was get them there.

The city at 4 AM was the quietest version of itself, and he moved through it. 

“Talk to me,” he said.

“I’m fine,” she said through her teeth.

“That’s not talking to me, that’s managing me.”

She almost laughed. Then another contraction arrived and the almost-laugh became a sharp exhale and she pressed her head back against the seat and he ran the red light.

“Avalon.”

“I know,” he said. “I know.”

Dr Okafor met them at the entrance the way she’d promised she would, and the sight of her standing there in the hospital light did something to Avalon’s chest that he hadn’t expected. He felt his eyes sting briefly and blinked them away because there was no time for that yet.

“How far apart?” Dr Okafor asked, taking Selene’s arm.

“Six minutes,” Selene said. “Five by the time we parked.”

“Good,” Dr Okafor said. “You waited exactly the right amount of time.”

“I told her that,” Avalon said.

“You told me to leave forty minutes ago,” Selene said.

“I was anxious,” he said.

“You were catastrophizing,” she said.

“Same thing,” he said.

Dr Okafor looked between them with the expression of someone who had seen many versions of this exact conversation and found it reliably human. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go meet your daughter.”

The room they were taken to was quieter than he expected. He’d imagined something more dramatic somehow, more cinematic. Still, it was just a room with equipment, a window, and a bed, and the functional lighting of a place designed for work rather than atmosphere, and Selene climbed onto the bed; he pulled the chair close, sat beside her, took her hand, and she held on with a grip.

They were there for seven hours.

At 11:47 AM Selene made a sound he’d never heard from her before and would never forget, and then a different sound filled the room, and Dr Okafor said She’s here, and they put Elena Castellano Pierce into her mother’s arms.

He stood very still.

He’d told Selene weeks ago that he thought he’d be undone by the first moment Elena noticed something for the first time, the light coming through a window, a sound she hadn’t heard before, and he’d been right about being undone but wrong about the timing because it happened right now, it happened immediately, it happened the moment he saw his daughter’s face for the first time and understood in a way that bypassed thought entirely that this was the thing, this was what everything he had been building toward, not the company, not the foundation, not the depositions or the board battles or the federal courtrooms, this face, this specific moment, this person who had not existed before and now did and was looking at the world for the first time with the bewildered gravity of someone arriving somewhere they’d been traveling toward for a long time.

He made a sound.

He didn’t know what kind of sound. Something that wasn’t language. Something that came from a place that didn’t have language yet.

Selene looked at him over Elena’s head.

Her eyes were wet. His were too.

“Hi,” she said to Elena. 

And Elena, four minutes old, made a sound back.

Selene laughed. The one that came from somewhere below the chest, the one he’d once said he couldn’t remember and had spent a year adding to a private list of things that made up who she was, and there it was in a hospital room on a Friday at 11:51 AM, real and alive and entirely her.

He sat on the edge of the bed dropping his arm around her and looked at his daughter.

“Elena,” he said her name out loud in a room where she existed. “Hi.”

She turned her head slightly toward his voice.

He felt that in every part of himself simultaneously.

“She heard you,” Selene said.

“Yes,” he said. Though what he meant was more than yes. What he meant was everything, what he meant was all of it, what he meant was I understand now, I understand what the waiting was for and what Nene meant and what your grandmother spent thirty years building toward and why it had to be you specifically, why it could only ever have been you, why the inconvenience was the point. What he said was yes because the rest of it was for later, for the years of telling her, for the long work of explaining everything she’d arrived in the middle of, for the questions she would ask when she was old enough to ask them and the answers they would give her, all of it, nothing managed, nothing withheld, everything.

Yes.

For now, yes.

They let Maya in at one.

She walked through the door and stopped and looked at Elena in Selene’s arms and her face did something that Avalon had never seen on Maya’s face before. Not the brightness she handed out freely. Not the sharp humour she wore like armour. Something underneath all of that, something that had been there all along waiting for the right moment.

She crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed and looked at Elena for a long time without speaking. Kofi stood at the door with his hand on the frame, watching his wife meet her niece, and his face was doing its own quiet thing that Avalon understood now in a way he hadn’t eight months ago when Kofi had been a stranger who sat down at a table uninvited.

“Hi,” Maya said finally to Elena. Her voice was different. Lower. “I’m your Aunt Maya and  I’ve been waiting for you.” She looked at Selene. “She has your nose.”

“She has his jaw,” Selene said.

“She has Nene’s expression,” Maya said. “That looked like she’s already assessed the situation and found it mildly insufficient.”

Avalon looked at his daughter’s face.

She did, actually.

She absolutely did.

Margaret came at two and cried properly, briefly, with the decisiveness of someone who had decided tears were warranted and was not going to perform otherwise. She held Elena for exactly three minutes and then handed her back and said she’s perfect and sat down.

Dr Ruth came at three. She stood at the edge of the room and looked at Elena from a distance for a moment before coming closer. Selene watched her face and reached out and took her hand without explanation, and Dr Ruth looked at Elena and then at Selene and something passed between them that Avalon understood without being part of it.

“She’s here,” Selene said quietly.

“She’s here,” Dr Ruth said.

That evening when everyone had gone and the room was quiet and Elena was asleep in the bassinet beside the bed and the hospital had settled into its nighttime version of itself, Avalon sat in the chair beside Selene and they both looked at their daughter sleeping.

She slept the way newborns slept, completely, with the total commitment of someone who had done something significant and needed to recover from it.

“She looks like she’s solved something,” he said.

“She has,” Selene said. “She’s arrived. That’s enormous.”

“Yes,” he said.

Selene leaned her head back and looked at the ceiling and said nothing for a long moment and he didn’t fill the silence because he’d learned what her silences held and this one held something large and good and didn’t need anything from him except his presence.

“Avalon,” she said eventually.

“Yes.”

“We did it.”

“Yes,” he said.

“All of it,” she said. “The year. The foundation. The displacement bonds and Henderson and Reeves and Edward Pierce and Thomas and Diana and all of it. We did all of it and she’s here.”

“She’s here,” he said.

“Nene’s question,” she said.

He looked at Elena sleeping.

At the face of someone who had just arrived and had no idea yet what she’d arrived into, what had been built for her, what questions had been asked and what answers had been found and what was still being found and would always be being found because that was the nature of it, the building was never finished, the question was never fully answered, you just kept going, you just kept building toward.

“What are we actually building toward?” he said quietly.

Selene smiled at the ceiling.

“Her,” she said. “We were always building toward her.”