Afterward, in the parking lot, he sat in the driver's seat of his truck with his hands on the wheel and did not start the engine. The baby was asleep in her car seat in the back, an impossible, fragile weight, a pale curl of hair under a knitted hat. Nora sat in the passenger seat and watched the sleet slide down the windshield.
"I can't do this," Daniel said. "I don't know how to do this. I've got three jobs going. I've got Lakeside, I've got the Congdon porch, I've got the church on Fourth. I don't—I can't even—" He made a sound she had never heard a grown man make. "I don't know how to make the bottles. Tessa did the bottles."
Nora thought about her job, which she could do from anywhere with a laptop, if her supervisor was feeling generous. She thought about the House, and the life it was going to buy her someday, a bungalow with a porch and a garden and a room that could be a nursery if she ever found anybody worth making a nursery for.
She thought about her sister holding the baby out over the frozen steps.
"I'll stay," Nora said. "A couple of weeks. Until things settle."
Daniel put his forehead on the steering wheel and wept, and she put her hand on his back and left it there, and in the back seat the baby slept on, unaware that her life had just been rearranged by two terrified adults in a hospital parking lot.
A couple of weeks became a month. A month became the winter.
* * *
She learned the baby the way you learn a language by being dropped into a country where nobody speaks yours. She learned that Linnea liked to be held facing out, so she could see the world and complain about it. She learned that the bottles had to be exactly body temperature or Linnea would refuse them with a stiff, outraged arch of the back, and that the fastest way to warm them was in a mug of hot tap water while you swayed from foot to foot and sang. She did not know many lullabies, so she sang what she had: half-remembered hymns from their grandmother's church in New Ulm, the jingle from a car dealership commercial that had haunted her childhood. Linnea liked the car dealership best.
She learned to work in the gaps. Medical coding is quiet work, translating the chaos of a body into numbers an insurance company will understand, and she did it at the kitchen table at four in the morning with the baby monitor hissing beside her laptop, and at noon while Linnea napped, and at nine at night after the last bottle. Her supervisor in St. Paul let her go fully remote and then, when her productivity numbers dipped, cut her to thirty hours. Nora said thank you and meant it.