Chapter 505: Seven Hours Old

The nursery had two walls painted and two left in the flat contractor white the room had come with, a paint swatch taped crooked beside the window where Arianne had left it three weeks ago and never come back to choose between. The changing table stood assembled and empty. A stack of folded onesies sat on top of it with no dresser to go in yet. Lexx’s crib — the same one, because there was no reason to buy a new one when this one had years left in it — stood in pieces against the wall, taken apart the day they started repainting so the wood wouldn’t get spattered. Franz had meant to put it back together that same week. His hand had cramped through the instructions by page four the one afternoon he tried, and neither of them had found another afternoon since.

He was not supposed to be lifting that box at all. He did it anyway, one careful inch at a time, testing his grip before he committed his weight to it, when Arianne came in to tell him lunch was ready and stopped in the doorway instead, one hand braced against the frame, her face doing something that had nothing to do with lunch.

"Franz."

"What." He set the box down too fast and turned.

"I think that was a contraction."

He crossed the room before she finished the sentence. "How long?"

"I don’t know. I wasn’t timing it — I was thinking about paint."

He got her into the one finished piece of furniture in the room besides the changing table, the chair by the window, and crouched in front of her the way the doctor had shown him months ago, watching her face instead of the clock. "Breathe. I’m here."

"I know you’re here." She said it through her teeth, one hand pressed flat against the underside of her belly. "That’s not the part I’m worried about."

Another contraction came four minutes later. Then one at six. He did the math badly, twice, before Arianne took the phone out of his hand and opened the app herself, her thumb steadier than his had been.

"The bag isn’t packed," she said, between contractions, watching the screen instead of him.

"Neither is the crib." He said it flat, not as a joke, though it landed like one anyway, some of the tension going out of her shoulders for a second. "We had a system for Lexx. Weeks of warning. I checked that bag twice before we ever used it."

"You remember checking it twice because you didn’t have a coma between the checking and the using."

He didn’t have an answer for that, and she didn’t ask him for one, only reached for his hand and held it through the next wave, her grip finding the same intensity it had the first time, over a different child he hadn’t missed a single day of.

Aunt Estella met them on the stairs before Franz had to go looking for her, already reaching for Arianne’s free arm, already asking how far apart before either of them had explained anything. Some instinct in that house ran faster than words did.

"Five minutes," Arianne told her. "Maybe less."

"Then you don’t need the good bag, you need any bag." Aunt Estella was already moving, pulling open drawers, throwing in whatever her hands found first — a nightgown, socks, the phone charger off the kitchen counter, a granola bar grabbed on her way past the refrigerator. "Weeks of planning and it comes down to whatever’s closest. It always does. Go. I have the twins. I have Lexx. Go."

"The twins—"

"Will be here when you get back, with a new brother and several complaints about missing school for it. Go."

Franz drove with one hand on the wheel and the other in Arianne’s, the same as he had the first time, except this time his grip didn’t shake and hers did. Somewhere between the estate gates and the highway he understood the fear hadn’t disappeared. It had only changed which one of them was carrying it.

Arianne’s labor with Lexx had run sixteen hours and left her wrecked by the end of it. Franz braced for the same math this time, recalculating the drive, the hours, everything he remembered from before. It never came. The nurse had warned them a second baby sometimes moved faster, and Louis took her at her word, active labor to delivery in under five hours, quicker than either of them had let themselves hope for. Arianne moved through most of it focused and largely unbothered, the same look she wore in boardrooms where the outcome had already been decided in her favor before she walked in, more annoyed by the wait between contractions than by the contractions themselves.

Franz stood where the nurse put him, out of the way and not so far that he could pretend distance from any of it, and matched his own breathing to Arianne’s because it was the one thing he had to offer that nobody more qualified was already doing. When Louis cried for the first time, thin and outraged and furious at the whole process, Franz felt the fear he’d been carrying since a rig failed on a film set six months ago finally let go.

Arianne held him first, skin against skin the way the nurse recommended, watching his face with the same total focus she gave anything she’d already decided mattered. She didn’t cry, not even when the doctor lifted him into her arms and set him against her. She held on, and let Franz watch her do it.

Louis was seven hours old before the room had settled enough for Franz to actually look at him. The visitors had come through one after another across the evening — Aunt Estella first, wiping her eyes and denying it, then Gilbert and Audrey with a gift bag Audrey admitted she’d bought weeks ago, on the off chance, and never found the right day to give until tonight.

The twins had already had their turn, each of them cross-legged on the small couch with Arianne’s hands hovering the whole time, and Lexx had watched the entire procedure with open envy. He wanted a turn too, both arms out and insistent, but Franz kept the actual holding to himself and brought Louis down to Lexx’s level instead, one hand guiding a small palm to rest flat against Louis’s back while the rest of him stayed exactly where Franz’s own arms put him.

Lexx studied his brother’s face for a long moment, the same look he gave anything he was deciding whether to eat, then patted his stomach once and declared him "baby" like he was closing a case. The twins had already decided he was theirs to manage, arguing in the hallway over who got to tell people at school first, until Aunt Estella herded all three of them out with the promise of pancakes and a longer visit tomorrow.

Before she went, Lily planted herself at the foot of the bed for one last announcement. "We picked his name," she said, like a title she’d been saving all evening to use. "Not only agreed to it. Picked it."

Leo nodded, backing her up without needing further explanation.

"Lily and Leo," she said, counting them off on her fingers, "and then Lexx, because he needed to match. And now Louis, because he needed to match too. It has to keep going or it doesn’t make sense."

Franz hadn’t been there for that particular campaign. It had happened somewhere in the six months he’d missed, one more small decision made without him in a house that hadn’t waited around for him to keep living. Even so, he’d heard enough of the aftermath since waking to know Lily considered the matter settled, and closed to appeal.

Arianne had finally stopped fighting sleep sometime after that, her hand loosely wrapped around his.

He sat in the chair by her bed, the same kind of hospital chair he didn’t remember much about from the first time, except this time he remembered all of it, the seven hours and the doctor’s voice counting something down and the sound this particular baby had made before any nurse reached him, thin and outraged and entirely his own. He had been in the room for every second of it. He had not missed a single one.

He looked at Louis in the bassinet, swaddled tighter than the nurse had probably intended, because Arianne had redone it once already for her own peace of mind. Dark hair, already thick enough to see against the white of the blanket. A small, indignant frown that hadn’t let go since the delivery room.

None of it was ready. Lexx’s new room down the hall was finished. That part had been easy, four walls and a fresh coat of blue, done in a weekend once Franz’s arm had cooperated enough to hold a roller. The nursery next to it was not. Lexx’s crib lived in pieces against the wall, waiting on the same two hands that hadn’t managed page five yet. There was no name on a door that didn’t have a door yet.

Franz sat with that fact. For the first time since he’d woken up in a room he hadn’t recognized, it cost him nothing to hold it. They would finish the room eventually, badly, and probably bickering by the end of it. Louis would sleep in his parents’ room until they did, same as his brother had before him, and none of it would matter to a newborn any more than it mattered to Franz right now, holding a hand he had no intention of letting go of again.

"Stop apologizing to the ceiling," Arianne said, without opening her eyes, her voice thick with sleep. "I can hear you thinking from here."

"I wasn’t apologizing."

"You were doing the thing where you don’t say it out loud but I can feel it anyway." She found his hand without looking, her fingers curling weak and certain around his. "We’ll finish the room. It’ll get done. It always does, eventually, on our own time."

"I know."

"You’re not supposed to know that yet. You’re supposed to be worrying about it."

"I was. For about six hours." He looked at Louis, at the frown that hadn’t loosened, at one fist working itself free of the swaddle. "Then I got to watch the whole thing happen instead of missing it, and it stopped mattering how ready the room was."

She didn’t answer that, but her hand tightened once around his, and outside the window the sky had started to go gray at the edges, morning closer than either of them had noticed staying awake for it. Back at the house, a room waited half-painted for a crib that wasn’t built yet. Franz could let it wait a little longer now.