The compound meets Iris one careful introduction at a time.
Not all at once. I would not have allowed all at once even if anyone had suggested it, and nobody did, because the compound has learned, across the months and the people who have come through its gate, that significant arrivals deserve the specific pacing that lets each person have their own moment rather than a crowded, shared one.
My mother comes first, on the morning we return, because my mother has been waiting in the operations room since dawn with the specific, contained anticipation of a woman who built parallel systems for twenty nine years and has never, in all that holding, held a grandchild.
She looks at Iris for a long time before she speaks.
She says: she has your father's chin.
I say: my father.
She says: not L
