HANNAH’S BABY SHOWER WAS an event. Her and Jack’s wedding had been pretty great, if filled with drama. But this one was going to be drama free. All of their friends and family were there and happy, and there was no one there to have a massive fight that would preoccupy them for days.
Sasha had been deliberate and ruthless with seating arrangements. Hannah’s mother needed to be seated far away from Molly Simpson and Sean Nolan, because Hannah’s mom and Jack’s mom were bound to start divvying up holidays with Baby Nolan before they were even born.
Hannah had agreed to talking any of their know-it-all mommy friends—who’d put up a fuss about a co-ed shower—into leaving an hour before the shower officially ended so that she could have one glass of the very good champagne that Bridget and Matt had contributed to the cause.
It didn’t matter that they were all gathered at their usual gathering place—Dooley’s—with people they usually saw. The space was transformed. When they’d finished decorating, Patrick had congratulated her very personally in his office in the back.
And the shower itself went off without a hitch. Sasha had nipped any stupid games in the bud, knowing that a thirty-eight-thousand-weeks-pregnant Hannah would punch anyone who put a perfectly good chocolate bar inside a diaper in the face.
In the few months since they’d moved in together, Sasha and Patrick had put any talk of their future on hold. Everything had moved so fast up to that point that they didn’t want to rush. They’d agreed that they were both in it for keeps, but they hadn’t really talked about marriage or kids. Sasha had always pictured kids in her future, but she could live without them if Patrick didn’t want to be a parent.
Their relationship was enough for her.
Sometimes, like at big family events where everyone used to look to Patrick for some words of spiritual wisdom, she worried that Patrick missed being a priest.
And the nice thing about hanging out with her friends and their dudes was that the dudes helped with cleanup. Hannah and Sasha got to spend some time hanging out in one of the booths talking about nothing and everything like they didn’t really have much time to do anymore.
“How are you feeling?” Thankfully, Hannah’s pregnancy had been very normal after the first trimester, but she could not possibly be comfortable.
Hannah sighed and took another sip of her ob/gyn-sanctioned champagne. “Pretty good. I’ve been having some contractions, but my doctor said those were Braxton-Hicks. Fake ones.”
“Are you ready to be a parent?” Sasha knew that Hannah had long-standing misgivings about her own maternal instincts. She didn’t share the same doubts about her best friend. For one thing, Hannah was a lot softer than people thought she was when they first met her. For another, she was going to be a ferocious mama bear when it was called for. She’d pretty much mama-beared Sasha into doing a whole host of things that had changed her life.
Hannah looked over at her husband and smiled. “With him? Definitely. I never feel like I have to teach him how to be a functioning adult person. We fill in each other’s weaknesses. I know that I have him as my backup, and so I feel like I can do anything.”
“Yeah, he might be able to keep you from overthrowing the PTA when they make unreasonable demands.”
Hannah gave her a skeptical look as she finished her glass of champagne. “You know that’s happening. You’ll have to whip support from the moms who think I’m dangerous to the status quo.”
“I don’t know if I’ll ever be eligible to be a member of a PTA.”
“Haven’t you and Patrick talked about kids?” Coming from someone else, that question might be offensive. But this was her best friend—the person whom she’d confessed her deepest innermost thoughts to for over a decade. And Hannah wasn’t going to judge her for her answer either way.
“Not yet.” Sasha hesitated. One thing about being in a relationship with her best friend’s husband’s best friend was that anything she said tended to come back to her as a conversation. Most of the time, it was fine. This was big, important, life-changing stuff, though. “We’re just taking things day by day.”
Hannah grimaced, and that made Sasha doubt her approach. But while her best friend took charge and stormed the barricades whenever an issue needed to be addressed, Sasha tended to skirt around the issue and take bites off the edges until it was more manageable. Their differences made them wonderful business partners but sometimes caused them to get frustrated with each other.
“I mean, we have time, and things have been so good. I don’t want him to start thinking of all the things he’s missed out on by giving up the priesthood. Like—he probably didn’t want children if he was going to go ahead and become a priest?”
Hannah grimaced again and touched her stomach. “No, it’s probably fine that you haven’t talked about this. I actually think that I’m having a real contraction. Like a real, real one.”
Sasha stood up and yelled, “Jack!”
THERE WAS A QUESTION for a few minutes as to whether they would make it to the hospital before Hannah dropped a baby. However, she’d been adamant about having her baby in a hospital and not the “fucking floor of Dooley’s bar,” so they’d rushed her to the University of Chicago Hospital even though she’d looked like she was working harder to keep the baby in than push it out at that point.
Not that Patrick knew very much about the birthing of babies. But they’d made it with minutes to spare. And even though Hannah’s birthing plan had provided for Sasha to be in the room with her and Jack, the hospital put the kibosh on it.
Until they had news that the baby and Hannah were both doing fine, Sasha was pacing so quickly that she’d likely wear a hole in the waiting room floor.
She was biting her thumbnail, like she did when she was very nervous. It was one of her very few tells.
“Do you want to maybe sit down?” Patrick asked, knowing that it wouldn’t go over well.
He was right. She looked at him as though he’d grown a second skull. “Hannah could be bleeding out, and no one could be listening to her. She needs me to go ham on people sometimes.”
“Jack is not going to let anything bad happen to her.” Patrick knew that his best friend would burn the hospital down if they didn’t take care of Hannah.
“Do you have any idea of the maternal mortality rates for women of color? Even controlled for education, income, and previous health status—it’s bad.” He should have gently suggested that Sasha stop reading every pregnancy article published for the past few months. Sasha was throwing her hands around and tears were now streaming down her face. He was failing at this. He stood up and caught her around the waist. She glared at him. “Yes, I read all those stories. All of them. That’s why I was supposed to go in with her.”
“I know you’re scared.”
“She’s my family,” Sasha said. She’d been upset the month before when her sister Madison had sent her a picture from their other sister’s baby shower. But after she’d pulled herself together, it felt like she had turned a corner, until right now.
“I know.” He hugged her tight, and some of the tension seemed to drain from her body. “But I know it’s going to be all right.”
Her “But how?” was muffled against his shirt.
“I just have faith.”
“Well, I don’t,” she said, this time looking up at him. “I only have faith in things I can see and control.”
“And that’s why you’re the only woman I could be with.”
“Huh?”
“You see and control all the things that can be seen and controlled. And I have faith.”
She opened her mouth to argue with him when Jack came in happily, with a big grin on his face. “She’s perfect.”
They both rushed over to their beaming friend. “How is Hannah?” Sasha demanded, and Patrick clapped Jack on the back.
“She’s perfect, too.” He wiped his face. “The doctor said that it couldn’t have gone better. It was so fast, and she was so mad at how much it hurt. But they’re fine. They’re both fine. She punched me in the dick at one point, which I’m going to have to get checked out. But she and the baby are fine.”
Jack looked down for a long moment, like he was collecting himself. Patrick’s heart ached with happiness for his friend.
“Can we see them?” That was Sasha. She wasn’t going to believe that they were really okay until she put her own eyes on them.
“Sure, yeah.”
Jack led them down the hall to one of the private maternity suites. It had only taken so long for Jack to get out to them because everything had gone so fast that a room wasn’t ready for them by the time the baby had been delivered and checked out.
“What’s her name?” Jack and Hannah hadn’t shared any of the names they were thinking of before the baby was born, though they’d had plenty of finger-pointing arguments about it at family dinners over the past few months.
Jack looked at him. “Grace.”
And then it was Patrick’s turn to tear up. That was his mother’s name. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“I mean, it’s probably not too late to change it if you want to use the name.”
Patrick looked over at Sasha, who was holding baby Grace and fussing over Hannah, who looked tired but happy. She didn’t seem to have heard what Jack had said.
He’d been meaning to broach the subject of their long-term future for quite some time, but Sasha had deftly avoided it. He didn’t think that she was going to break up with him, but he respected the fact that she’d been through a lot—exerting strong boundaries with her family, moving in to a less luxurious apartment with an ex-priest, now bartender, keeping a business running while her partner was using a lot of energy making a human.
But looking at her holding a baby made him want to know where she was at with it all. Did she want a house, marriage, and a baby? Or was she totally cool with how things were?
Everything was good. But he wanted more than everything with her.
When they were leaving—having promised to bring sushi and the rest of the very good champagne—he decided that it was time. They were walking down the hall, and he had his arm looped around her shoulders. “What do you think of all that?”
“All of what?” Sasha looked exhausted and confused and he had a moment of doubt that this was the right time to discuss this. “We have to go pick up Jack and Hannah’s dog from Bridget—”
“Having a baby. You know. Making a new person and trying not to fuck them up too much.”
Sasha blew out a deep breath. “You make it sound so poetic.”
He stopped in the dim, quiet hallway and turned her toward him. “You want poetry?”
“Always,” she said, a wry smirk on her face.
“Well, here it is. There once was a priest from Nantucket—”
Sasha hit him on the chest. “I meant, like Yeats, not a dirty limerick.”
“Have you met my father?”
“Yeah, he’s a dirty-limerick type.” Sasha winked at him.
“You’d be surprised.” Patrick smirked, but then he said, “You are the rose that blossoms on my heart, but I’d like you to be the rose that blossoms with my ring on your finger and my baby in your belly. But only if you want that. I’ll keep you in my heart in an apartment above a bar with a roof that leaks if that’s the only way you’ll have me.”
“You want that?” He hated that she sounded even a little bit surprised. “We just haven’t talked about it. Did you just decide?”
Patrick shook his head. “No, I didn’t just decide. I probably knew that was what I really wanted the day I walked in to see you reading to a bunch of preschoolers.”
“That would not have been the moment to tell me.”
They’d had a long road ahead of them to get here. “No, it wouldn’t have. I didn’t know that loving and caring for another human being could be a higher calling than the one I had.”
“Are you sure?” He wasn’t sure what else he could do to get her to believe this, so he dropped down on both knees and pulled out the ring that he’d been carrying around in a pouch in his pocket.
“I was going to do this at dinner tonight, but then Grace showed up.”
“Are you proposing?” Her question was loud enough they got a dirty look from a nurse. “Get up.”
“Are you saying no?”
She hit him on the chest. “Of course not. I’m saying yes. Yes, to being your wife. Yes, to having babies. All of it.”
“Then why are you curtailing the moment? You know how I feel about ritual.”
She pulled him by the hand toward the hospital doors. “Yeah, but I want to be the rose that blossoms on places that would get us arrested in public right now.”
“That’s my best girl.”