Page 49 of Thunder

I look back once at the waiting area as they wheel us through.

Thunder's already got Waylon—Bex must have run him over, or Mama Lou, somebody handed him off in the chaos—no, it's Thunder alone, lowering himself into a plastic chair with a two-year-old on his knee and his bad leg stretched out straight.

Waylon's already fascinated by his beard, and the last thing I see before the doors close is the Sergeant at Arms of the Shotgun Saints making a serious face at a toddler to keep him from crying.

Then the doors swing shut, and there's no more time for anything but Grace.

I won't ever forget it.

Two hours, hard and fast and primal, Grace gripping my hand and the bed rail and cursing Shadow's name and then, right at the end, going somewhere quiet and far away inside herself the way I imagine women have since the beginning of time, and then⁠—

A cry.

Thin and furious and brand new.

Braxton Lyle-McCrae comes into the world red-faced and screaming with a full head of dark hair.

They put him on Grace's chest and she breaks, my composed unflappable sister just breaks wide open sobbing and laughing at once.

I'm crying, and the nurse is smiling, and I’ve never in my life been so glad to be exactly where I am.

"He's perfect," I tell her, wrecked. "Grace, he's perfect, look at all that hair⁠—"

"Shadow's gonna lose his mind that he missed it." But she's laughing when she says it, kissing that tiny furious head. "You were here, though."

She looks up at me, and her face is stripped all the way down, no walls left, nothing but exhaustion and love and the ghost of everything we lost.

"You were here, Presley. You didn't have to be, after how I've—" Her voice cracks. "You helped me. You stayed. You held my hand and you didn't let go."

"I'll never not be here." It comes out fierce, truer than anything I've said in weeks. "Whatever else is broken. I'll always come when you call. Always."

She reaches out with the hand that isn't cradling her son, and she takes mine, and she holds it.

For the first time since a hospital hallway a lifetime ago, my sister holds my hand because she wants to and not because she's in pain.

The ice doesn't melt all at once.

But it cracks.

Right down the middle, it cracks, and something starts flowing through that I'd given up on ever feeling again.

Shadow makes it forty minutes after, tearing through the doors gray-faced and road-filthy and frantic.

I slip out to give them the room because some moments belong to a husband and wife and a brand-new person and nobody else.

The waiting room's filled up while I was gone.

Bex is there now, and she's got Waylon on her hip, feeding him crackers, which means Thunder handed him off.

Dakota's there, sitting apart with her arms crossed and her face doing complicated things—she gives me a look when I come out, and it's not warm, but it's not the flat wall it's been either.

"He's here?" she asks. "Everybody's okay?"

And when I tell her yes, healthy, screaming his head off, something in her shoulders comes down, and she nods at me.

Just once.

It's not much.