Page 58 of That Defining Moment

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Colin had been awake for forty minutes, which was enough time for him to have insulted the tea, rejected the toast, and started a territorial dispute over the positioning of his daughter.

“You’ve got her shirt bunched up at the back,” Colin said, from the fortress of pillows that Diwa had propped him up on. “Pull it down. She’ll be cold, Sander.”

“She’s not cold. She’s radiating heat like a furnace. I think she might actually be solar-powered.”

“Pull it down.”

Lysander pulled his little sister’s shirt down. She lay in the crook of his arm with her legs drawn up and her mouth working in a slow, absent rhythm.

“And this is why Tala’s my favourite child,” Colin muttered. “She does as she’s told.”

“She’s eleven days old, Daddy. Give her time.”

Colin watched them from across the pillow. His face was thinner than it had been even a week ago, the bones of his jaw and his cheekbones pressing closer to the surface, and the shadows beneath his eyes had deepened into bruises that no amount of sleep touched. His hands lay on top of the duvet, pale and still, his veins showing blue-green through skin stretched too thin.

He was just out of hospital, and what remained of him was a version of Colin that ran at a fraction of the wattage Lysander was used to. His father slept fourteen hours a day. He ate when Diwa brought food and stopped eating when the effort of chewing outstripped his interest in the meal. He could get as far as the en suite with Diwa’s arm around his waist, but that journey left him breathless enough that he needed to sit on the closed lid of the toilet for five minutes before he could stand long enough to pee.

But at least his edge was still there. He was too tired to sit up without pillows propping him in place, but he could still find the energy to nag Lysander about the way he held his sister.

“Took you long enough to get our girl her feed,” Colin grumbled at Diwa as he approached. “What were you doing down there, Diwa? Have you set up your own screening lab in the kitchen?”

“No.” Diwa crossed to the bed, the bottle held upright in one hand. “The warming system takes a few minutes. It’s designed to avoid hot spots in the milk like a microwave would leave.”

Colin’s eyes narrowed. “The warming system.”

“I got us a medical-grade bottle warmer. It uses steam circulation.”

“I microwaved all of my twins’ milk, and they turned out fine.”

“Did we, though?” Lysander asked. “I did end up doing porn for a living.”

Colin hit him on the arm without tearing his glare away from Diwa.

Lysander shifted Tala across, settling her into the hollow between Colin’s arm and his ribcage. Colin’s hand came up to cradle her head.

His irritability fell away, and his voice rose into the high, musical register that Lysander remembered from his own childhood.

“Hello, my gorgeous girl,” Colin murmured, his thumb stroking the curve of Tala’s ear. “Hello, my little star. Are you hungry? Are you? Daddy’s got you.”

Tala blinked up at him.

“She looks just like you did,” Colin told Lysander, his eyes never leaving her. “You and Stevie. Same nose. Same cross little mouth. But with Diwa’s hair and his chin, I think. It’s a good chin.”

Diwa held out the bottle. Colin took it, adjusted his grip so that the teat angled towards Tala’s mouth, and waited for her to latch.

She rooted twice, her head turning left and then right, her mouth opening in a wide, searching gape that found the teat on the third pass. Her lips closed around it, and her jaw began to work.

“There she is,” Colin said, watching her drink. “There’s my girl.”

Diwa took a half-step closer. “Do you want me to —”

“No.”

“I can hold the bottle for you —”

“I said no, Diwa.” Colin’s jaw set, and the softness vanished. “I’ve fed babies before. Leave me to it.”