Until they had news that the baby and Hannah were both doing fine, Sasha was pacing so quickly that she’d likely wear a hole in the waiting room floor.
She was biting her thumbnail, like she did when she was very nervous. It was one of her very few tells.
“Do you want to maybe sit down?” Patrick asked, knowing that it wouldn’t go over well.
He was right. She looked at him as though he’d grown a second skull. “Hannah could be bleeding out, and no one could be listening to her. She needs me to go ham on people sometimes.”
“Jack is not going to let anything bad happen to her.” Patrick knew that his best friend would burn the hospital down if they didn’t take care of Hannah.
“Do you have any idea of the maternal mortality rates for women of color? Even controlled for education, income, and previous health status—it’s bad.” He should have gently suggested that Sasha stop reading every pregnancy article published for the past few months. Sasha was throwing her hands around and tears were now streaming down her face. He was failing at this. He stood up and caught her around the waist. She glared at him. “Yes, I read all those stories. All of them. That’s why I was supposed to go in with her.”
“I know you’re scared.”
“She’s my family,” Sasha said. She’d been upset the month before when her sister Madison had sent her a picture from their other sister’s baby shower. But after she’d pulled herself together, it felt like she had turned a corner, until right now.
“I know.” He hugged her tight, and some of the tension seemed to drain from her body. “But I know it’s going to be all right.”
Her “But how?” was muffled against his shirt.
“I just have faith.”
“Well, I don’t,” she said, this time looking up at him. “I only have faith in things I can see and control.”
“And that’s why you’re the only woman I could be with.”
“Huh?”
“You see and control all the things that can be seen and controlled. And I have faith.”
She opened her mouth to argue with him when Jack came in happily, with a big grin on his face. “She’s perfect.”
They both rushed over to their beaming friend. “How is Hannah?” Sasha demanded, and Patrick clapped Jack on the back.
“She’s perfect, too.” He wiped his face. “The doctor said that it couldn’t have gone better. It was so fast, and she was so mad at how much it hurt. But they’re fine. They’re both fine. She punched me in the dick at one point, which I’m going to have to get checked out. But she and the baby are fine.”
Jack looked down for a long moment, like he was collecting himself. Patrick’s heart ached with happiness for his friend.
“Can we see them?” That was Sasha. She wasn’t going to believe that they were really okay until she put her own eyes on them.
“Sure, yeah.”
Jack led them down the hall to one of the private maternity suites. It had only taken so long for Jack to get out to them because everything had gone so fast that a room wasn’t ready for them by the time the baby had been delivered and checked out.
“What’s her name?” Jack and Hannah hadn’t shared any of the names they were thinking of before the baby was born, though they’d had plenty of finger-pointing arguments about it at family dinners over the past few months.
Jack looked at him. “Grace.”
And then it was Patrick’s turn to tear up. That was his mother’s name. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“I mean, it’s probably not too late to change it if you want to use the name.”
Patrick looked over at Sasha, who was holding baby Grace and fussing over Hannah, who looked tired but happy. She didn’t seem to have heard what Jack had said.
He’d been meaning to broach the subject of their long-term future for quite some time, but Sasha had deftly avoided it. He didn’t think that she was going to break up with him, but he respected the fact that she’d been through a lot—exerting strong boundaries with her family, moving in to a less luxurious apartment with an ex-priest, now bartender, keeping a business running while her partner was using a lot of energy making a human.
But looking at her holding a baby made him want to know where she was at with it all. Did she want a house, marriage, and a baby? Or was she totally cool with how things were?
Everything was good. But he wanted more than everything with her.
When they were leaving—having promised to bring sushi and the rest of the very good champagne—he decided that it was time. They were walking down the hall, and he had his arm looped around her shoulders. “What do you think of all that?”
“All of what?” Sasha looked exhausted and confused and he had a moment of doubt that this was the right time to discuss this. “We have to go pick up Jack and Hannah’s dog from Bridget—”
“Having a baby. You know. Making a new person and trying not to fuck them up too much.”
Sasha blew out a deep breath. “You make it sound so poetic.”
He stopped in the dim, quiet hallway and turned her toward him. “You want poetry?”
“Always,” she said, a wry smirk on her face.
“Well, here it is. There once was a priest from Nantucket—”
Sasha hit him on the chest. “I meant, like Yeats, not a dirty limerick.”
“Have you met my father?”
“Yeah, he’s a dirty-limerick type.” Sasha winked at him.
“You’d be surprised.” Patrick smirked, but then he said, “You are the rose that blossoms on my heart, but I’d like you to be the rose that blossoms with my ring on your finger and my baby in your belly. But only if you want that. I’ll keep you in my heart in an apartment above a bar with a roof that leaks if that’s the only way you’ll have me.”
“You want that?” He hated that she sounded even a little bit surprised. “We just haven’t talked about it. Did you just decide?”
Patrick shook his head. “No, I didn’t just decide. I probably knew that was what I really wanted the day I walked in to see you reading to a bunch of preschoolers.”
“That would not have been the moment to tell me.”
They’d had a long road ahead of them to get here. “No, it wouldn’t have. I didn’t know that loving and caring for another human being could be a higher calling than the one I had.”
“Are you sure?” He wasn’t sure what else he could do to get her to believe this, so he dropped down on both knees and pulled out the ring that he’d been carrying around in a pouch in his pocket.