Page 66 of Ruthless Claim

“She really is.” I look at my red-painted fingernails. “Tougher than she should have to be today, honestly.”

He makes a noise of agreement, and I notice how tense he looks, the rigid lines of his body apparent to everyone.

I gesture toward her room. “Do you want to see her?”

He shakes his head. “No. I—I don’t, uh, want to see her in pain.”

I nod, not wanting to press him.

But even as we sit here, I’m aware of him—the warmth of him nearby, the particular quality of his silence that is not empty, that has always had something in it.

I think about Emma saying you like him.

Yeah. Probably. Dammit.

Leo staggers back out at about 1:30 a.m., looking scared and excited all at once. “It’s soon,” he says, and his voice is strange. “They said—soon.”

Then a nurse appears at the door and says, gently, that it’s time for everyone except Leo to please wait outside, and Leo disappears behind the door. It clicks shut, and there is just us.

The waiting room is still full at almost two in the morning.

We sit in uncomfortable chairs in a room with terrible lighting and the hum of a vending machine, knowing that on the other side of that door something is happening that is the most extraordinary thing in the world.

I reach over and take my mother’s hand.

I feel her squeeze, and I squeeze back, and we wait.

At two fourteen in the morning, just as I’ve started dozing off, the door opens.

We all jump up.

It’s a nurse and she’s smiling. “Seven pounds nine ounces,” she says. “Mother and baby are both doing beautifully.”

My mother closes her eyes in relief while Teresa makes a sound that is barely audible.

I press my free hand to my mouth and breathe and breathe.

Cillian puts his hand over mine on the armrest and doesn’t say anything, but from how tightly he’s squeezing my left hand, I know he’s overcome.

She’s here. Baby Santoro is here.

They let us back in one at a time and I go third, after Teresa and my mother.

Grandmothers deserve to see their granddaughter first.

When it’s my turn, I stand in the hallway outside Emma’s door with my hand on the wall and I try to get my face into some kind of order.

It’s not going well, which is fine.

Emma will understand.

I go in.

Emma looks like she has been through hell, but she has never been more beautiful.

She is propped against the pillows with her hair half undone from the braid and her face blotchy, but her eyes are bright.

She is holding a bundle that I know is a baby, but it doesn’t seem real until I get closer and it becomes real all at once.