Chapter Thirteen
949 Words
DAMIEN'S POV
Dana called at six in the morning and I drove to the hospital alone. James offered to come. I told him no. Victoria offered. I told her no. This was something I needed to do without an audience.
He was small and pink and furious about being in the world, which made me smile for the first time in the delivery room in eight years.
The nurse put him in my arms and I stood there looking at him. Catherine's eyes, the genetic profile had suggested. Her bone structure in the set of his jaw. I'd wanted this for two years. Had planned it, contracted it, grief-engineered it from start to finish.
I felt love. Clean and immediate. He was my son and I loved him.
But the feeling underneath it was different from what I'd expected. I'd thought holding Catherine's biological child would feel like getting something back. Instead it felt like a door closing gently on something I'd been refusing to let go.
She was gone. Nathan was here. They were not the same thing.
I sat with him for two hours while Dana rested and the nurses cycled in and out. He slept against my chest with the boneless trust of newborns.
I texted Olivia from the hospital: ‘Nathan arrived this morning. Healthy. He's good.”
She replied twenty minutes later: “I'm glad. Give him my best.”
I told Ethan that afternoon after school.
He sat on the kitchen counter eating an apple and processing it with the deliberate calm he'd developed recently, this new version of himself that thought before reacting.
"Can I meet him?"
"Soon. When Dana's recovered and the timing is right."
"Is he going to live here?"
"Yes. He'll have the room next to yours."
Ethan chewed his apple. "Olivia's baby is coming in two months."
"About that."
"So I'll have two siblings. One here and one at Olivia's apartment."
"Yes."
He turned this over. "That's actually kind of a lot."
"It is."
"Is Olivia okay? About Nathan being born today?"
The question caught me off guard. Not the content but that he'd asked it. Six months ago this child hadn't spoken. Now he was reading rooms.
"I think so. I texted her."
"That's not the same as asking."
I looked at my eleven year old. "No. It's not."
"You should call her." He said it simply, like it was obvious, then slid off the counter and took his apple upstairs.
I called her that evening.
She picked up after three rings. The background noise told me she was cooking. "Is something wrong?"
"No. Ethan suggested I call. To check in properly."
A brief pause. "Smart kid."
"Apparently." I moved to study. "How are you actually doing?"
"I'm fine. Genuinely." She paused. "It's not painful the way you might think. Nathan being born. I made my peace with the surrogacy a long time ago." She set something down in the kitchen. "What I wasn't prepared for was how it would make the pregnancy feel more real. Like a countdown became concrete."
"Eight weeks roughly."
"Seven and a half. This baby is measuring ahead."
"Are you sleeping?"
"Not really. The baby is nocturnal apparently. Very active between midnight and three AM."
"Like their father."
She was quiet for a second. Then: "You work at midnight?"
"Most nights."
"That's not healthy."
"No." I paused. "Is there anything you need? For the apartment. The nursery."
"Victoria helped me with the nursery last weekend. It's done."
My mother hadn't mentioned it. "What color?"
"Yellow. Neutral. Grace from down the hall helped paint." A small pause. "You can see it . If you want."
The offer was careful. Deliberate. She'd thought about whether to extend it before she did.
"I'd like that," I said.
"After the eighteen week appointment. We can do the s*x reveal then and I'll show you the nursery."
"Okay."
Another pause, not uncomfortable. "Damien. Nathan is your son. Whatever complicated feelings exist about how he came to be, he's here now and he's yours. Don't let the grief around it stop you from just being his father."
I hadn't expected that. "Why are you saying that?"
"Because you have a pattern of letting complicated feelings freeze you. I've watched it for eighteen months." Her voice was matter of fact, not unkind. "Nathan doesn't need to be complicated. He just needs you to show up."
"The same thing you needed."
"Yes." Simply, without accusation. "But I'm saying it about Nathan, not about us."
"I know."
"Good night, Damien."
She hung up.
I sat in the study with the phone in my hand, thinking about what she'd said. The same thing you needed. Past tense. She'd moved it into past tense without drama, just accurate language, which was somehow both better and worse than anger would have been.
I went to see Nathan the next morning.
He was in the bassinet in the hospital room, Dana asleep in the bed. I sat in the chair beside him in the early quiet and watched him sleep.
He had no idea what he'd been born into. The grief that had made him, the plans that had collapsed around his conception, the woman who'd been displaced by his existence before he even existed.
He just breathed. Small and steady and completely unaware.
I thought about Olivia's child doing the same thing seven and a half weeks from now. Same father. Completely different story.
I put my finger in Nathan's palm and he gripped it automatically, the reflex grip of newborns that means nothing and feels like everything.
"I'm going to do better," I said quietly. "For both of you."
He slept on, unbothered.
- Writer
