Chapter 9
Savannah read Bernice’s message twice. On the second pass, her mouth tightened—not with surprise, but with the effort of keeping her face still.
“‘Christopher will change his mind,’” she said. “Not ‘I hope he will.’”
I sat across from her, leaving the table between us. The pink blanket lay folded at the far end, untouched since I’d brought it home. I had bought it to make her smile. Now I couldn’t look at it without seeing the blood on Savannah’s lip.
“I won’t change my mind,” I said.
“You said that before.”
The words landed softly. They still hurt.
“I know.”
She set her phone down. “Your mother didn’t just say she wanted to visit. She talked as if she’d already been given a place in everything. The appointments. The birth. The decisions we haven’t even made yet.”
I remembered Bernice leaning over the kitchen counter months earlier, one hand on her chest as she announced she’d be the first to hold her granddaughter. I’d laughed and said she’d have to get in line.
At the time, it had seemed harmless. A joke to keep the conversation light, to avoid telling my mother she had no claim to the room where my wife would give birth.
Savannah had been standing beside me. I remembered that now, too.
“She’d say she knew what babies needed,” Savannah continued. “Then she’d tell me how things would go. I kept waiting for you to say something.”
“I should have.”
“You made it sound like we’d already agreed.”
“I know.”
She looked down at her hands. “I’m not asking you to fix the past with one conversation.”
“I won’t.”
“I need to know we’re making these decisions together. Not deciding what she’ll tolerate.”
My first instinct was to promise I’d handle Bernice. I stopped myself. That promise would have put me in charge again, as if Savannah’s job were to trust me while I managed the consequences.
“What do you want?” I asked.
She studied me for a moment, checking the question for a hidden expectation.
“I want you with me when the baby comes,” she said. “No one else in the room unless I ask. No calling your mother to announce I’m in labor. I don’t want her showing up at the hospital or waiting outside because she thinks being family means she gets a turn.”
“Then we won’t tell her until we’re ready.”
“And no visitors at home until I say so. Not your mother, not anyone sent by your mother. I don’t want to have to explain myself from a hospital bed.”
“You won’t have to.”
Savannah’s gaze sharpened. “Don’t say that because you think it’s comforting.”
“I’m saying it because I’m agreeing.”
She waited. I could feel how much depended on what I did next, and how little depended on how beautifully I said it.
“Those are our boundaries,” I said. “And you can change your mind about any of them.”
“About the visitors?”
“About all of it. The birth, the calls, who knows what and when.”
She nodded once. “I don’t want our daughter’s first day to become a family vote.”
“It won’t.”
Savannah picked up a notepad from beside her phone. She wrote slowly, stopping to think between lines. When she finished, she slid it across the table. I read her words without picking up the pen.
No announcement until we choose. No visitors until invited. No one holds the baby unless we say yes.
The last line had been underlined.
“Do you want to add anything?” she asked.
I looked at the paper, then at her. “I want you to know I’ll say no even if you aren’t standing there to hear me say it.”
Her shoulders eased a fraction. “Add that.”
I wrote it beneath her lines. My handwriting looked too large for the page.
Savannah read the sentence, then folded the paper in half and kept it beside her phone. It wasn’t a ceremony. It wasn’t forgiveness. But for the first time since Bernice had left, the future felt like something we were allowed to shape ourselves.
The quiet lasted until my phone buzzed.
Bernice’s name lit the screen. Savannah glanced at it, then turned her attention back to the folded paper.
I opened the message.
There was a photograph attached. Beneath it, Bernice had written: I should be the first to hold her. She’ll need her grandmother.
My chest tightened. The picture showed a tiny pink blanket folded into a square.
May you like
I knew that blanket.
It was the one I’d brought home on the day I found Savannah on the floor. Bernice had a photograph of it.
