When they led her into the NICU, Dorothy moved like a woman in borrowed skin. Everything in the room glowed—monitors, isolettes, screens, the green pulse of machines measuring the fragile persistence of life. Three tiny infants lay in three separate stations under warmed air and hospital light.
Margot first. Dark hair already visible in the thin down on her head. Tiny nose. Delicate chin.
Then Bridget, cheeks a little fuller, eyelids fluttering in sleep.
Then Theodore, the smallest, his mouth opening and closing as if the world had surprised him.
Dorothy reached into Margot’s isolette with shaking fingers. The baby’s hand closed around one of hers on instinct, the smallest grip Dorothy had ever felt and somehow the strongest.
“I’m here,” Dorothy whispered.
She did not know whether she was talking to the baby or to the daughter who would never hold her.
When she came back out into the hall, Grant Ashford was standing near the window with his phone in his hand.
He looked up when he saw her. His eyes were red. His tie was loosened. His hair was disordered in a way that suggested he had run his fingers through it several times with purpose.
“Dot,” he said, and moved toward her with open arms.
Dorothy let him hug her because she did not yet trust herself to speak.
He smelled like antiseptic, expensive cologne, and the stale trace of rain.
“She fought so hard,” he said quietly against her temple. “Doctor Prescott said there was nothing anyone could have done. The hemorrhage was catastrophic.”
Dorothy stepped back and looked at him.
He closed his eyes for half a second, then opened them again, carefully composed.
“The babies are okay,” he added. “That’s what matters now. That’s what Colleen would want us focused on.”
Us.
Dorothy had always disliked how quickly he used that word in moments that served him.
She nodded once because there was no strength in her for argument. Not yet.
An hour later, after signing papers and answering questions she would not later remember, Dorothy went to the waiting room for water. The room overlooked the parking garage through a wall of windows blackened by rain. Down below, near a silver sedan, Grant stood under the yellow spill of a light.
He was not alone.
A woman stood beside him, close enough that their shoulders touched.