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It took a little longer than usual for the sound of her alarm to pierce its way through Emily’s sleep and finally drag her into consciousness. Hitting the alarm off, she rolled onto her side, assuring that, thankfully, she hadn’t ignored it so long that JJ had been woken by it. If she felt like she’d only been asleep for fifteen minutes or so, then she couldn’t imagine how exhausted JJ, who had nursed the baby through the night, must be.
Sliding out of bed, Emily stifled a yawn, moving on autopilot towards the door at the end of the hall. Pain twinged along the line of her neck, down into her right shoulder, the result of sleeping awkwardly to accommodate a body who more often than not ended up wedged between her and JJ. It had become such a constant that even on the weeks where he was with his dad - as he was now - Emily found herself contorting her body around Henry’s ghost. It was nothing a Motrin and a heat pack couldn’t solve, but it did hurt to push the door to the nursery open, yet another reminder she wasn’t as young as she once had been. Her life seemed to be full of those these days.
The baby was asleep on her side. That might have panicked her, before, but now she was used to it. Emily tiptoed to her, bending gently over the crib and rolling her over. Through heavy lids, she could see the movement of eyes trying desperately to blink awake, a loose eyelash against a soft, rosy cheek. Emily stroked the crescent moon of hair away, breathing in the sweet smell that seemed to cling to every inch of her daughter, watching as she slowly woke.
“Hello,” she murmured, as dark eyes blinked open to look up at her, so much like her own that it was hard to believe they weren’t genetically related. “Good morning, sweet girl.”
Before the first little cry could escape tiny lungs, Emily reached across and turned off the baby monitor. The seventy-five minutes between her alarm going off and the very latest Emily could leave the house was the one part of the day where JJ could be guaranteed rest bite - at least when the team weren’t away on a case. Whilst JJ slept, Emily would take the baby downstairs, make a proper breakfast, do any simple tasks around the house that she could before she needed to set off. It had taken huge amendments to her daily routine - showering mostly at night now, and mastering the art of putting a whole face of make-up on in ten minutes, one handed - which Emily didn’t love to begin with, but the sacrifice was more than worth it.
With the baby safely cradled against her chest, Emily headed downstairs, singing softly to the bundled up infant. It was a sure fire way of ensuring she didn’t cry in the space between leaving her crib and being placed in her Moses basket downstairs, even if Emily found herself cringing at her own voice, scratchy from sleep, fumbling over lyrics in a way JJ never did. After her first cup of coffee, she’d be awake enough to deal with the sling, too complicated whilst half-asleep, and she’d sing some more, doing a better job with the words, if not always the tune.
(She knew Tessa was too small to notice the mistakes, too young to even differentiate the sounds, but Emily wanted to get them right for her, wanted it all to be perfect).
There had been a time where all of this had been so out of reach, motherhood little more than a forbidden longing, a constant ache somewhere unbearably close to the surface, but buried far enough that it felt unmentionable. Emily had considered everything she had gone through with the kind of careful analysis she usually reserved for profiling—her lonely childhood; the abortion; everything with Ian Doyle; Declan; her incapability to set down roots—and reached the conclusion that she was too damaged to ever have a family. The fact she was physically unable to bear a child seemed both inevitable and, in some ways, a relief. The choice taken out of her hands. She couldn’t ruin a child if she never had the opportunity.
But then JJ had happened.
Even before, when everything between them was teetering off the edge of platonic, but only just, JJ had believed in her in a way nobody else ever had. The topic of motherhood had emerged a few times—A discussion about adoption, leading to Emily finding a brochure for a fostering agency on her desk, a post-it note’s worth of encouragement in JJ’s neat handwriting stuck on top; later, when she was pregnant with Henry, JJ holding Emily’s hand to her belly, them both biting back the kinds of smiles that threatened to split their faces wide open. It had been easy, briefly, to pretend that JJ wanted them to do it together.
Back then, Emily had never imagined they actually could, let alone one day would.
It was different from any other part of her. Motherhood felt too precious a thing to dive into head first, the way Emily had so many other elements of her life. She had been tentative in her approach to becoming a larger part of Henry’s life, taken the prospect of a baby of her own at an even more apprehensive pace. Despite being something that she had wanted so much, and for so long, there was the gnawing voice of uncertainty in the back of her mind from the moment JJ suggested trying. It was near impossible to avoid the ghosts of her past. How could Emily be a good mother when the only maternal figure she’d known had never been anything but distant and cold?
“What if the things we missed out on as children is what makes us good parents?” JJ had said, lying on her stomach one afternoon, playing with Emily’s fingers where they rested on the bed.
The way Tessa does now.
There had been a sadness in her eyes that told Emily it wasn’t just for her benefit that JJ was saying it. That she was thinking about her own childhood, the parents who had neglected her from the moment her sister died. Her mom, who had refused to come to the wedding, and who had only met Henry once.
Emily had known, too, that JJ was thinking about the baby she lost. That bringing another child into the world wasn’t something she was taking lightly either.
Noticing Tessa was starting to quietly fuss again, the low whistle of the kettle boiling waking her from shallow sleep, Emily stopped spooning coffee into the press, and moved towards her. As usual, it only took her stroking the baby’s soft hair to get her calmed, Tessa curling a tiny hand around one of Emily’s fingers and refusing to let go until sleep took over. By the time she was down again, the water was boiled, ready to go. Extracting herself from Tessa’s grip, Emily continued the process of brewing the coffee, the rich aroma of it soothing her the same way her presence did for her daughter.
That juggling the two - the perfect cup of coffee, and manoeuvring the baby to the opposite counter so she could start in on chopping veggies for breakfast - was such an engrained part of her morning routine now never felt anything less than extraordinary. The fact that she was cooking at all would have astonished her previous self, who ran off baked goods and espressos, a sneaked cigarette on the way to work on the bad days (a bad habit she no longer indulged in, only in part because there were no bad days anymore).
She had done the one thing that that Emily had never allowed herself to do.
She’d let herself be happy.