At 4:51 in the afternoon, with the October sun coming low and gold through the blinds, Bev said, "One more, honey. One more and she's here," and Nora pushed with everything she had, everything she'd been carrying since August—the glass, the scream, the deed, her mother's dry old eyes, Grant's tie curled on the table—pushed all of it out of her body in one long animal cry, and then there was a sudden absence, a terrible lightness, and then a sound.
A thin, furious, outraged wail.
They put her on Nora's chest, wet and purple-red and slippery and astonishingly heavy, seven pounds four ounces, with a fist jammed against her own mouth and a full head of dark, damp hair. She stopped crying the moment she touched skin. She opened her eyes—dark blue, unfocused, enormous—and looked at nothing at all with an expression of the deepest suspicion.
"Hi," Nora said. Her voice broke on the word. "Hi. Hi. It's you. It's you. I've got you."
Frank was crying. He wasn't making any sound but his face was wet and he had one big scarred finger resting on the baby's back, very lightly, as if she were something he'd made and wasn't sure would hold. Priya was crying and pretending not to, wiping her face on the sleeve of the deposition blazer. Bev patted Nora's shoulder and said, "Does she have a name?"
Nora had thought about it for months. She'd had a list. Grant's name had been on some of the list, for a while—his grandmother's name, Evelyn—and in September she'd crossed it off with a black marker so hard the pen tore through the paper.
"Leona," she said. "Leona Rose."
"After your granddad," Frank said thickly. "Leo."
"After Grandpa." She looked down at the small furious face. "And Rose for Grandma Rosa. And because—" She stopped. She didn't know how to say the rest of it. Because a lemon tree that loses half of itself in a freeze can still make fruit. Because it's still making lemons, which is the entire argument for anything.
"It's a good name," her father said. "Strong."
Leona Rose made a small sound, like a cough, and then, decisively, fell asleep.
* * *
Grant came to the hospital the next morning, notified in writing per the order, at ten o'clock, for one hour, with Frank in the room. He stood at the foot of the bed in a clean shirt holding a stuffed giraffe he'd obviously bought in the gift shop downstairs, its price tag still dangling from one ear, and when Nora let him hold Leona he did it badly, stiffly, his elbows wrong, until Bev came in and adjusted his arms without a word. Then he just stood there holding his daughter and crying silently while she slept. Nora watched him and felt, again, nothing she could name. He had been a good man in a lot of small ways and a terrible one in the one way that turned out to matter. She suspected he would spend the rest of his life trying to figure out how both could be true. That was his work, not hers.