Chapter 504: The Room That Isn’t Ready

Franz had been awake since five, working through the ankle stretches his physical therapist had assigned him before Arianne could catch him at it, and by the time she came downstairs he’d already decided the day’s real assignment was hers, not his. Her feet had started swelling by mid-morning most days now, and getting to them before she noticed had turned into its own small contest against the clock. Two weeks home had taught him that seven months pregnant made shoes optional most days, and made his own one-armed sock removal look like a physical therapy exercise, which it mostly was.

"You don’t have to do this every morning," she said, not stopping him.

"I want to." He worked the sock off with his good hand, his weaker arm braced flat against her ankle for balance more than pressure, and pressed his thumb along the arch the way the pamphlet on the counter had shown him. "It’s the one item on today’s list I can actually finish before lunch."

"Franz."

"I know." He didn’t look up from her foot. "I’m allowed to want the one I can finish."

She let him have it, the way she’d started letting him have most of these small, stubborn insistences since he came home — not because she needed the help exactly, but because refusing it would have cost him something neither of them wanted to name out loud. He was learning what his body could and couldn’t do again, day by day, with no guarantee tomorrow’s list matched today’s. She was learning how to let him try anyway.

The new dresser for the nursery had been sitting boxed up against the guest room wall for four days, waiting on someone with two working arms to move it, and Franz decided somewhere between the sock and the coffee that he was done waiting on Gio’s schedule to get it done. He got it unpacked and as far as the hallway outside the nursery before his left arm gave out under the weight of it, no warning beyond a tremor he’d stopped trusting himself to feel coming in time, and he had to set it down hard enough that Arianne heard it from the kitchen and came to find him standing over it like the dresser had done something to him instead of the other way around.

"You were supposed to wait for Gio."

"Gio’s an hour out, and I’ve been up since five." Franz flexed his left hand, testing it the way he’d tested it every day for two weeks, watching for the lag that showed up more often than he wanted to admit. "I made it four feet."

"You made it four feet, and now the hallway’s blocked." She said it without heat, more fact than complaint, and came to sit on the arm of the reading chair someone had moved out here months ago and never moved back. Her feet had already started swelling again despite everything he’d done that morning, one more detail he’d missed the first time around and now tracked the way he tracked his own recovery — one more thing the six months had cost him the chance to watch happen gradually instead of all at once.

He sat down on the floor next to the dresser, because standing had stopped being worth the effort of pretending it wasn’t, and looked past her into the nursery. It had Lexx’s crib in it, the mobile with the paper stars Aunt Estella had made for his first winter, the changing table with a giraffe decal peeling at one corner. In six weeks, less now, it would need to be a different room for a different child, and there hadn’t been six months to prepare for that the way there should have been. There had been a coma, and a recovery, and now six weeks.

"We should have started this in your third trimester," he said. "Not your seventh."

"We started it the day you woke up capable of holding a paintbrush." Arianne said it plainly, refusing to let him carry guilt for math that had never been his to control. "It’ll get done."

It got interrupted before either of them could argue the timeline further. Lily appeared in the hallway with Leo a step behind her, both of them in school uniforms, both of them looking at the blocked dresser like two people who’d already discussed it the whole walk down the hall.

"We have an idea," Lily said. "About the baby’s room."

"Let’s hear it."

"Lexx could sleep in our room. Just until his new room’s ready." Lily said it like she’d rehearsed it, which she probably had, Leo nodding beside her, arms crossed to match, already committed and not about to break formation now. "He can have his crib by the window. We already asked Aunt Estella if it would fit, and it does."

Franz looked at the two of them, seven years old and already rearranging their own space to solve a problem that wasn’t theirs to solve, the same instinct that had them treating every hard thing in this house as something to be managed on their own and handled before an adult had to ask. It told him more about the six months he’d missed than any of the numbers on a growth chart had.

"You don’t need to give up your room," he said. "Either of you."

"We’re not giving up anything. We just—"

"Lily." He said her name gently enough that it wasn’t a correction, only a stop. "I appreciate it. I do. But you’re not giving up space in your own room so your brother has somewhere to sleep. That’s not a job that belongs to either of you."

Leo frowned, already recalculating. "Then where does he go?"

"With us." Franz said it before he’d finished deciding it, though the decision had been sitting in him since the twins walked in, maybe since the dresser, maybe since he’d first started counting the weeks he had left to make up for the ones he’d lost. "He can sleep in our room until his is ready. It’s not a hardship. I’d like the company."

Arianne looked at him for a second longer than the plan required, the kind of look that meant she’d already understood the second half of what he hadn’t said out loud, and didn’t argue it in front of the twins. "That works. He’s small enough it won’t crowd anyone."

"I think our idea was good anyway," Lily said, mostly to Leo.

"It was a good idea," Franz told her. "This one just costs less."

He found Lexx twenty minutes later in the den, sitting on the rug surrounded by a disaster of building blocks he’d abandoned mid-project in favor of pulling every book off the bottom shelf instead, and when he saw Franz in the doorway he abandoned that too, crossing the room at the fast, unsteady run that was new enough to watch that Franz hadn’t gotten tired of it yet.

"Dada." Lexx said it like an announcement, both arms up before he’d even reached him, and Franz crouched down with the knee that complained about it and caught him with the arm that worked, letting the other one rest against Lexx’s back for balance rather than lift.

"Hey, buddy." He got upright slower than he wanted to, Lexx’s weight settled against his hip, and carried him back toward the kitchen at the pace his body currently allowed rather than the one he wanted. "How do you feel about a sleepover?"

Lexx, who understood approximately none of that sentence, patted Franz’s jaw with one open palm and said "Dada" again, satisfied with the answer regardless of the question.

"That’s a yes," Franz said, and meant it as much for himself as for the boy who couldn’t have cared less either way, already reaching past Franz’s shoulder for the fruit bowl on the counter, already on to the next thing. Franz let him take an orange he had no plan to eat and carried him the rest of the way into the kitchen anyway, in no hurry to put him down.

That night Lexx fell asleep between them faster than either of them expected, one fist closed around a corner of Franz’s shirt like he intended to hold on through the night on principle, his breathing gone even and unbothered inside a few minutes. Franz stayed awake longer than he needed to, his bad arm propped where it wouldn’t be crushed, watching the rise and fall of a chest smaller than his own and thinking about every night of the last six months he hadn’t been in a room to hear this sound at all — every bedtime, every bad dream, every ordinary Tuesday he hadn’t been present to carry a small, sleeping weight through.

"You’re supposed to be resting," Arianne said, not opening her eyes, her voice already halfway into sleep.

"I am resting." Franz moved enough to fit his hand over the curve where their second child was weeks from arriving, and felt something answer against his palm, small and insistent, like it had been waiting for him to ask. "This is what resting looks like now."

Arianne didn’t argue that either. She found his free hand in the dark, laced her fingers through his, and let the three of them stay exactly like that until morning.