Lena's POV
They let me hold him at two in the morning.
The NICU nurse carried him to me with the careful precision of someone handling something irreplaceable, her movements slow and deliberate, the kind of care that came not from fear but from complete understanding of what she was carrying and what it meant. She placed him in my arms and adjusted the wires and the monitor leads with practiced efficiency and then she stepped back and the world stopped.
I just stopped.
Everything I had been carrying for seven months, two weeks. Everything I had been carrying for six years before that. The bus station and the rain and the pavement and Margaret's hand connecting with my face and Aiden's voice calling me worthless and the boardroom and the gate and all of it, every single piece of the arc
