Chapter 507: Great-Grandmother

Louis had started sleeping in four-hour stretches sometime in the last week, and Arianne had stopped taking it for granted the way she’d assumed she would. She fed him at six, put him down by six thirty, and had actual coffee instead of the reheated half-cup she’d been drinking cold for a month by the time Lexx wandered into the kitchen, working out how his own feet operated. He’d stopped auditioning for attention weeks ago. Now he climbed into the chair across from her and asked for toast like it was owed to him, which, at this point, it more or less was. Franz’s mornings had stopped being scheduled around call sheets and started being scheduled around Louis’s naps instead, a trade he’d never once mentioned missing.

Lily had a chart for Louis’s naps taped inside her closet door, updated in her own handwriting every morning before school. Leo had graduated from narrating dinosaurs at Louis to reading him the actual dinosaur book cover to cover, twice a day, whether Louis was awake for it or not. The paper letter L remained taped to the nursery closet door, a little more crooked each week, and nobody had bothered taking it down. The house had found its rhythm. Arianne had stopped waiting for it to break.

Julian called at nine, which was itself unusual. His calls usually landed midmorning with a subject already decided, three sentences about a filing or a board seat before he remembered to say hello. This one opened with her name and nothing after it for a second too long.

"Is it Grandmother?" Arianne said, already knowing.

"She’s at the estate," he said. "Not the hospital. She wouldn’t go, and at this point nobody’s fighting her on it. They’ve got a full care team out there now."

Arianne set her coffee down without drinking any of it. "How long." Not really a question.

"Days. Maybe less." A pause, some sound on his end she couldn’t place, papers or a chair. "She’s asking for you. Franz too, and the kids specifically — she said the word ’children,’ plural, more than once."

"And Yosef?" Uncle, technically, though the word had never once fit right in her mouth.

"Already there. Hasn’t left the room in two days." Julian’s voice caught for a word, then moved past it. "He’s the one who called me, actually, not the doctor. Said he wanted family to hear it from a person instead of a hospital line."

The word landed strange. In four years, her grandmother had asked to see her three times, Franz there for the second, every one of them with an agenda decided before Arianne walked in the door. Today’s request came with no agenda attached.

She found Franz in the garage, halfway through changing the oil on a car he didn’t need to change the oil on himself, and repeated Julian’s sentences back to him in the same clipped order she’d received them. He set the wrench down before she finished the second one.

"When do we leave?"

"Louis is five weeks old," she said. "Ellie cleared him for outings two days ago. Nothing about a two-hour drive to a dying woman’s house."

Franz didn’t argue the point so much as absorb it and keep moving, already reaching for the bassinet insert boxed in the garage corner where it had sat since the shower. "Then we bring this instead of the full seat, and Aunt Estella rides with us so somebody’s hands are free the whole way." He wiped his hands on a rag and looked at her properly for the first time since she’d walked in. "You’ve met her three times. I was there for one of them."

"Three." Arianne didn’t offer anything past the number.

"Then we go, and we don’t make this one short too."

Lily wanted to know her name first, then her age, then whether "great-grandmother" was the correct term or if there was a shorter one people actually used. Leo wanted to know if he should bring the triceratops drawing he’d made at school, in case there wasn’t time to make a new one later. Arianne told them the truth in pieces sized for what they could carry — that this was her mother’s mother, that she was very sick, that this was likely the only time they’d meet her. Neither of them cried. Lily decided on the blue dress, because it was the nicest one that fit her. Leo decided, unprompted, to bring the drawing. Lexx, too young to be told anything that would mean something to him, picked up on the mood anyway, and spent the next ten minutes attached to Arianne’s leg refusing to say why.

They left within the hour. Aunt Estella packed a bag for herself without being asked twice, muttering about four children and one car being a logistics problem nobody had solved properly, then solving it in under twenty minutes flat. Franz loaded the trunk in an order that made sense to him and no one else, diaper bag last so it would come out first. Arianne buckled Lexx into a car seat he suddenly decided he hated, texted her assistant to clear the day, and called Vincent and Amanda from the driveway so they’d hear it from her before they heard it from anyone else. Amanda offered to come. Arianne told her there wasn’t room in the car, which was true, and left it at that. Vincent said almost nothing back, which told her more than a long answer would have.

The drive took just under two hours, most of it filled with Leo narrating the dinosaur book to a sleeping baby who couldn’t hear him and Lily correcting the pronunciation of a genus name nobody had asked her to correct. Somewhere past the halfway mark, both twins ran out of things to narrate and correct, and Lexx followed a few minutes after into an actual nap, and for a while it was only the road and the two of them up front.

"You don’t have to go in first," Franz said, eyes on the highway. "Whatever’s waiting in that room, you can let someone else open the door for once."

"I know." Arianne watched the exits count down. "I’m going anyway."

He didn’t argue that either. He’d learned a long time ago which fights were worth having with her and which ones weren’t, and this had never once been the first kind.

The Conway estate looked smaller than she remembered it. A member of the house staff met them before they’d reached the top step and led them past the study where all three of Arianne’s prior visits had taken place, up a staircase she’d never used, toward a wing she hadn’t known existed until Julian met them at the top of it, tie gone, sleeves pushed up, looking like a man who hadn’t slept properly in two days and wasn’t planning to start.

"She’s lucid," he said, before anyone asked. "In and out, but lucid when it counts. She’s been asking about the baby’s name since yesterday morning — either she’s more with it than the doctors think, or that’s the thing she’s decided she wants to know first." He looked at Lexx, then at the twins standing on either side of Aunt Estella, and his usual formal register dropped a full step. "Thank you for bringing all of them. I wasn’t sure you would."

"She asked for them by name," Arianne said. "Not asking felt like the wrong call."

Joyce appeared from a side room with a tray of untouched tea, saw the twins, and set it down hard enough that the cups rattled before she crossed the hall to hug Arianne without asking permission first. "You brought the whole crew," she said, voice thick, already crouching to Lexx’s level. "Good. She needs to see the whole crew."

Yosef found them next, coming from the direction of the room itself, and for a second nobody said anything. He looked older than the last time Arianne had seen him, though it hadn’t been long. He’d been standing at that door for two days, not sitting beside the bed, and it showed in the set of his shoulders. He nodded at Franz, then crouched to look at Lexx and Louis both before he straightened and looked at Arianne again.

"She’s asking about the baby’s name," he said. "Both babies, now that she knows there’s two who count." He didn’t say more than that, and didn’t need to. Arianne remembered the last thing he’d told her, years ago, and didn’t repeat it back to him now. Some things only needed saying once.

Franz lifted Louis from the bassinet carrier so Arianne’s hands would be free and didn’t ask if she was ready. Nothing about this had a ready state to reach, and they both knew it.

The door at the end of the hall stood half open, lamplight instead of the overhead fluorescent she’d braced for. Arianne looked back once — Franz with Louis, Aunt Estella’s hand on Lexx’s shoulder, the twins standing straighter than she’d ever seen them stand for anything — and then she went in first, the way she always had, because someone in this family had to.