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"Let me give back."

"No. Not tonight."

"Why not?"

The quiet goes on long enough that I hear Hildie shift in her bassinet.

"Tonight is for you."

He doesn't give me another one. He turns over onto his back and pulls me against his chest. One arm slides under my head and the other comes around my ribs and stops short of the incision.

I lie there and run the tape back over eight months of it. He drives. He carries. He paid for the car seats and the bassinets and every bag of groceries that has come into this condo since July. He builds things, he cooks badly, and he fixed a sink nobody asked him to fix.

I cannot find one single time he let another person hand him anything back, not a favor and not a turn and not one minute of being taken care of.

I've spent months lying awake wondering how this would go. It never once occurred to me that it would be as wonderful as this. This was never one of the scenarios I imagined.

His breathing evens out under my cheek, and I stay awake a long time inside the warm cage of his arm, turning it over.

It feels like I've only just drifted off in his arms when Hildie wakes first. Graham answers a minute later, which is the thing everyone promised twins would eventually do.

We don't split up. We sit against the headboard in the dark with a baby each and feed them side by side. When they finish, we ease down onto our sides facing each other with the two of them awake on their backs in the space between us.

Nobody sleeps. Graham gets one foot up on my forearm. Hildie makes the small repeating sound I would know anywhere now. Carson reaches across both babies until his palm covers the back of my hand. He doesn't lace our fingers, but he leaves it lying there.

"This is everything," I whisper.

The words scare me a little because I mean them.

"I know it."

Neither of us adds anything. I let myself picture it lasting on purpose. I don't convince myself of the version where I flinch and cut it short before anybody gets the chance to leave.

Carson gets up and lowers Graham into the bassinet and goes back for his sister.

The coffee's made when I come out. He's at the table with gray light coming through the slider, and both mugs poured. He made mine with the milk already in it because he learned that in week one and never asked again.

Lis is up before either of us can pretend to be quiet. She takes one look at the two of them stirring and has them buckled into the double stroller with a competence that makes me feel like a tourist in my own life.

"I'm taking them for a walk. Don't thank me."

"I wasn't going to."

The front door clicks shut behind her. Through the glass, I watch her park the stroller in the shade and settle into the chair beside it with one hand already rocking.

Then it's us and the refrigerator and forty minutes.

"The freezer's full," I tell him. "I did the milk bags when you went to see Hildie. There's a whole shelf now. Mom labeled them by date, which means she also reorganized my meat."

I pour myself a cup. "Your flight's after lunch, right?"

"Two-fifteen."

"I'm really going to miss you. Especially after that performance last night."

"More of that when I get back."

"Is that a promise?"