Chương 4
“It is to the wallet.”
The ordinary argument steadied my breathing.
Celia’s voice softened.
“How bad is Elena?”
“Very.”
“I’ll be there in forty minutes.”
“Twenty-five.”
“I am not letting your driver kill me because you have discovered urgency at age thirty-eight.”
She hung up.
Lila led me through two secured doors into the NICU at 12:06 a.m.
I had expected noise. Instead, the room held the controlled quiet of a place where every sound had been assigned a meaning. Machines breathed, clicked, and chimed. Nurses spoke in low voices. Behind glass walls, small bodies lay under blankets and wires.
My daughter was in the third bay.
The nurse said her name was Priya and asked me to wash my hands for three full minutes.
“I know how to wash my hands.”
“Most adults believe that.”
She watched me scrub beneath my nails.
I removed my watch, my cuff links, and the gold ring I wore on my right hand. My father’s ring. Heavy, square, ugly. Elena had once said it looked like something a nineteenth-century railway baron would use to stamp wax seals on eviction notices.
I placed it beside the sink.
Priya handed me a disposable gown.
“Your baby is on noninvasive respiratory support. She is stable at the moment. Do not touch her face or equipment. You may place one finger against her palm if she tolerates it.”
She opened the incubator porthole.
The baby was smaller than the loaf of bread Elena used to bake on Sundays. Her skin was red and translucent beneath the lights. A soft cap covered her head. A breathing device rested beneath her nose, and wires crossed her chest and abdomen.
I had seen men die.
I had watched a warehouse burn with three people inside because opening the doors would have fed oxygen to the fire. I had stood beside my father when a rival begged for another chance and learned, at fourteen, that adult men could sob without making a sound.
Nothing had prepared me for the sight of a hand no larger than the first joint of my thumb.
I put one finger near her palm.
Her fingers closed around it.
Not strongly.
Not deliberately, Priya later told me.
It was a reflex.
The body does not care whether a gesture is meaningful before it changes a person.
“What is her name?” I asked.
“She doesn’t have one in the chart yet.”
I watched the tiny rhythm of her chest.
“Elena will name her.”
Priya looked at me.
“Some fathers come in here and start making announcements.”
“I’ve made enough decisions for people who didn’t ask me.”
“That sounds tiring.”
“It is mostly tiring for them.”
She almost smiled.
The baby released my finger.
A monitor changed pitch. I froze.
Priya adjusted a tube and watched the numbers.
“She’s all right.”
“What happened?”
“She moved.”
“That changes the alarm?”
“Babies are inconvenient patients. They don’t read the manual.”
I stayed for eleven minutes.
When Lila told me it was time to leave, I did not argue.
Outside the unit, Jonas stood without his jacket. His shoulder holster was gone. Celia was beside him in black trousers, a camel coat, and running shoes she had probably pulled on without socks.
She looked at me once and wrapped both arms around my ribs.
My sister had hugged me perhaps six times in our adult lives. Twice at funerals. Once after I was shot. Once because she was drunk and had mistaken me for someone else.
I stood rigidly until she stepped away.
“You smell like hospital soap,” she said.
“You smell like a taxi.”
“I tipped him enough to forgive that.”
She handed me my passport.
Her gaze went through the NICU window.
“Can I see her?”
“Not yet.”
“Does she look like you?”
“She looks like someone who weighs four pounds.”
“That may still be an improvement.”
I sat on the bench outside the unit.
Celia joined me. Jonas remained standing.
“Where is Madison?” Celia asked.
“Being examined.”
“For what?”
“She thought she was pregnant.”
Celia turned her face slowly toward mine.
“You came here because your girlfriend thought she was pregnant, and you found your ex-wife giving birth to a different child who may also be yours.”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to need coffee before I decide whether that is tragedy or punishment.”
“It’s neither.”
“No?”
“Elena may die.”
Celia’s expression sobered.
She reached for my hand, stopped halfway, and folded a receipt from her pocket instead.
“What happened to her?”
“Her heart is failing.”
“Did she know she was sick?”
“I don’t know.”
“What have you been doing for eight months?”
The question was quiet.
I looked at her.
“Working.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
“I looked for her.”
“You sent people.”
“Yes.”
“Did you look?”
I almost told her there was no difference.
Then I remembered Elena’s hand over her belly, protecting the child from a world I had built.
“No,” I said.
Celia folded the receipt into smaller and smaller squares.
Jonas shifted near the wall.
I looked at him.
“Tell me everything.”
He did not pretend not to understand.
“Five days after the divorce, Elena called me from a prepaid phone. She said a black Suburban had followed her from a medical clinic in Oak Park.”
“What clinic?”
“She wouldn’t say. She asked me to check the plate. It belonged to North Lake Risk Management.”
“One of Victor’s vendors.”
“Indirectly.”
Victor Vale was my half brother, my chief operating officer, and the person I trusted to manage the parts of our company I preferred not to see.
He was six years older, careful where I was impulsive, patient where I was not. Our father had trained us as opposing tools. Victor was the lock pick. I was the hammer.
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“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
“The same night, I received an order from your account telling me Elena was attempting to manipulate company resources during settlement enforcement. The instruction was explicit. No contact. No assistance. No report to you.”
