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Her shoulders feel heavy, weighed down by the events of the day as she quietly pushes the front door of a small single story house on the outskirts of the city open. It’s later than she normally gets home, by hours tonight, so Samira toes off her shoes and places her keys on the entryway table without so much as a clink against the porcelain dish that they keep there.
Making her way toward the bedroom, she follows the trail of lights leading to the back of the house— the light in the main hallway, a lamp in the living room, the dimmer switch in the kitchen on but set to the lowest setting. Each light is a reminder that even on nights like tonight, she isn’t alone. Not anymore.
She hasn’t been in years.
The door to the bedroom is only half-shut and the room is dark, blackened by not only the sky but the thick blackout curtains required for someone that works the night shift. He is home tonight though, even if the light cast by the hallway shows an empty bed.
Samira continues on in the opposite direction toward the second bedroom down the hall, dodging a basket of laundry and a stuffed bear along the way. This door is cracked and the room is illuminated by the soft twinkle of a night light, but it isn’t what she sees that’s cause for concern. It’s what she hears. The soft “shhh” of an exhausted man. The whimpers of a barely big enough to toddle toddler.
“Jack,” she whispers, opening the door more fully. He turns his head enough to look at her without jostling the fourteen month old in his arms, pajama clad and wrapped in a thin blanket.
“Hey,” he smiles with a look that she knows too well. It’s one he’s been giving her since the days of her residency, before they were them and before they ever realized that there could or would be a them. He smiles at her like she gives him peace. “You’re home late.”
It’s that tell-tale sign that he knows. He knows her and this job better than anyone else.
Samira brushes him off. “Is he okay?”
Jack looks back to the baby in his arms, bouncing him quietly. “Yeah,” he hushes him, moving to place their son in his crib. “Spiked a fever after second nap. Daycare had me pick him up early.”
“Why didn’t they call me?” She wonders, ignoring the obvious that their son’s daycare knows his parents’ opposite schedules. “Why didn’t you call me?”
Ushering the both of them out of the room, Jack shuts the door quietly. “I sent you a text when I got him home but I knew you guys were slammed today. I would’ve been there if I hadn’t gotten that call—”
She knows this and if she were thinking logically right now, she wouldn’t have even questioned that.
“But I decided to get my shift covered rather than stick him with a sitter or pull you out of a trauma unless I had to. He’s good, honey, he’s fine. I’m watching him for croup but it looks like it’s just a cold.”
Samira sighs, nodding. There isn’t anyone that she trusts more with this family that they’ve built, and she knows that Jack would do anything for either of them. He would have called her had he needed to, and he never would have left her out of the loop. Hell, like he said, he had texted her earlier in the evening… She just hadn’t had the chance to check her phone and decided not to bother with it on the drive home.
“Now,” Jack says calmly, a stern steadiness in his voice. “Tell me what happened.”
“Nothing ha–”
“Samira.”
* * *
She settles into the couch in their living room with a cup of tea and watches as Jack plates a grilled cheese, cleaning up as he goes. It’s a simple gesture and far easier than some of the other concoctions he’s put together in that kitchen but he does it with just as much skill and focus as he’d put into a trauma. Just butter, bread, and cheese tossed around in a frying pan.
“Was it a kid?” He asks, looking toward her knowingly.
“Yeah.”
“How old?”
“It doesn’t… I don’t want to rehash it tonight, Jack.”
He grabs the plate from the counter and a napkin to go with it before padding over to the couch to give it to her. Stooping down in front of her, the click of his prosthetic as familiar as her own breath these days, Jack pushes a stray curl away from her face. “Honey, you cannot go to bed with this in your head. Whatever it is, you’ve gotta get it out. Trust me.”
She does, but the sting in her eyes and the burn in the back of her mind with him looking at her like that causes Samira to pull her attention away— eyes finding the baby monitor on the end table. Their son — the baby that they made — is safe and alive in a bedroom across the house. He stirs as she watches the screen, saving her with a soft cry.
“I’m gonna go check on him,” she says immediately, pushing off the couch. She places the grilled cheese and tea on the coffee table and heads toward the bedroom, leaving no room for her husband to object.
* * *
Inside the nursery, Samira catches her breath as she closes the door. This room, the stillness in the dark is enough to decrease her heart rate and stave off a panic attack but that won’t last forever. She walks over to the crib and plucks the baby out, holding him close.
He whimpers, dark eyes filled with tears with sweaty curls stuck to his forehead. She presses her lips there, noting the bottle of baby Tylenol on the dresser and decides that it probably isn’t time for another dose. He definitely has a temperature but it’s under control.
“Mama.”
“Hi, baby,” she whispers into his hair, holding him to her chest. “You’re okay. You’re okay. Mama’s got you.”
“Mama, mama, amma.”
“I know, I know.”
Samira thinks of the woman that she saw this afternoon— the new mother who couldn’t have been much older than she is herself, who can’t comfort her baby like this. She thinks of his pale face framed by a light head of curls, and the already ragged stuffed teddy bear on the floor by a first year med student’s feet. She thinks of how his cries just had gone quiet, of how his mother’s desperate wail had replaced them when Dr. Santos called time.
Her breath shutters. She doesn’t want to let go.
* * *
When she finally finds the confidence to head back out into the living room, Jack is on the couch. He has a medical journal balanced on his thigh, glasses propped on his nose, and his eyes follow the frame of her body until they fall steady on hers. She uses the few steps between them to put her hair up, needing to do something to stave off the shaking in her hands now that their son is back in his bed.
“He okay?”
“Yeah, he’s fine,” Samira responds. “When was his last dose of Tylenol?”
Jack looks at his watch. “About an hour ago. You’re not okay, though.”
Samira shakes her head.
“Come here.”
She moves toward him, stepping past the coffee table until she’s in front of the couch and close enough to settle into his arms, her back against Jack’s chest. He pushes the hair away from her neck and kisses her there gently, holding Samira securely. It’s safe – he is safe, and has been for a long time. She remembers working traumas with him during her days as a resident, how he matched her pace and happened to be the only person in the emergency department that seemed to be able to. The only one who was willing to.
“Tell me about your day,” Jack says gently. “Start from the beginning.”
* * *
7:00 A.M.
The ED was buzzing the second Samira walked through the doors, clipping her badge to her scrub top while the baby in her arms tried to reach for it. He was still tired, a little grumpier than usual, and after fighting for an hour to get the kid ready for daycare, she’d given up— opting to bring him to the hospital in a pair of dinosaur pajamas to trade-off with Jack the way they’d hand off their caseloads.
“Wow, the med students get younger and younger every year,” Shen’s voice came from just in front of the nurse’s station, his routine watered down Dunkin’ in one hand. “Damn, Abbot’s lucky that kid got nothing from him.”
Jack’s face came into view a moment later, the look of exhaustion morphing into something else— annoyance from Shen, adoration for his family. “Tell me about it. Hey, what are you two doing here? Is everything okay?”
“Hi, babe,” She chuckled as he rounded the desk and made his way to her. Jack quickly pecked her lips before taking the toddler from her arms. “Everything’s fine. Someone kept me up half the night though, and fought me all morning. I think he’s getting a new tooth.”
Jack looked from her to their son, inspecting his mouth. “You giving Mama trouble?”
“Mama,” he pushed his father’s finger away and pointed one of his own at Samira.
She grabbed the chubby finger, smiling softly. “Yeah, and now you’re Daddy’s problem.”
Her husband narrowed his eyes playfully. “I got him. I’ll see if I can get him to nap with me and if not, I’ll get him to daycare so I can get some sleep before my next shift.”
They chatted for a few more minutes, checking in as they always did before updating the other on their shift’s remaining cases. Victim of a mild hit and run in patient room three, stomach ache in four, and Ellis was wrapping up an overdose in trauma two. There was already a crowd in the waiting room waiting to be seen.
“Alright,” Samira sighed, kissing their son’s cheek before leaning up to meet Jack’s lips again. “Love you both. See you tonight.”
“Love you. Have a good shift,” he replied, waiving the toddler’s hand as if to say goodbye.
* * *
“And then what?” Jack asks as he lifts the now empty grilled cheese plate from her lap and moves it toward the table.
Samira’s fingers simply slide over the wedding band on his left hand. This one, she put there.
* * *
12:00 P.M.
The rest of the morning went on as planned. A few minor scrapes and bruises made their way into the emergency department, a kid who had been sent home from school sick, a teen pregnancy.
She’d spent twenty minutes updating the med-students on a new protocol before assisting a couple of R2s with a tricky diagnoses, and by noon, all of Samira’s charting was up to date.
“I hear you brought the kid in and I didn’t get to see him,” Dana said. She stood beside her as she plugged her credentials into the computer.
Samira saved the file on the one in front of her and pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to stop a yawn. “He was grumpy, you wouldn’t have had much fun.”
“Cutting teeth again?”
She nodded. Sometimes it was nice to be reminded of the network of working mothers that surrounded her, her mentors and peers alike. Women like Dana, Al-Hashimi, and McKay, who had been mothers longer than she had known them, had been godsends for Samira from the minute they’d found out about her pregnancy.
Of course they understood.
“It’s hard now but it’ll get better, Samira. Someday you’ll miss all of this,” the charge nurse said thoughtfully. “Well, all but the sleepless nights.”
—
3:00 P.M.
“We’ve got a twelve car pile up on the freeway coming in. Dispatch says that a couple of the cars collided with an eighteen wheeler. We need all hands on deck.”
Out of habit, Samira pulled out her phone and pulled up Jack’s location. Home— a small single story house in the suburbs.
“Dr. Mohan, we need you.”
* * *
“I heard it on the police scanner,” Jack admits, “But he’d just screamed the entire car ride home and you know our rule, we won’t leave him like that with a sitter.”
Looking at her phone now, Samira sees the text message that he had sent her saying just that. It had probably come within minutes of the first trauma rolling in.
* * *
6:00 P.M.
A little over three hours later, the frantic rush of rescue and recovery from the crash had started to slow. Critical cases dwindled, the number of stable patients now doubled the number in surgery, and the casualty count had stopped at two. Still though, adrenaline surged through Samira’s veins as it always had during a crisis and that only meant one thing— it would inevitably be a late night.
She’d seen Parker come in at some point, Crus hot on her trail while traumas poured into the ED. Shen was around here somewhere too, as well as a few other members of the night shift crew. But Jack hadn’t shown up yet.
Maybe he had trouble finding a sitter.
Once again, Samira pulled her phone from her pocket and bypassed the lockscreen — a family picture snapped by a stranger during their last day off together — to check his location. Still at home. She made a move to call him when…
“Dr. Mohan, we’ve got another one!”
The doors to the ED burst open, paramedics covered in crimson wheeling a gurney in as fast as they could. Horrendously small yet loud screams echoed throughout the room, screams that hit her right in the chest before she’d even seen the patient.
* * *
“I can’t,” Samira breathes, sitting upright on the couch. She buries her head in her hands and tries to calm the sobs before they escape.
Jack follows her lead, moves with her as one hand finds the small of her back and travels upward, caressing her spine. “Let’s take a break.”
* * *
This is one of the things that she loves most about him— Jack Abbot knows when to push, when to let her push, and he knows when to give her space. Tonight, he’s doing that tenfold.
Jack busies himself while Samira takes a few moments to collect herself. To breathe. He checks on the baby – sleeping as comfortably as he can with a cold, and not quite warm enough to cause concern – and makes her a second cup of tea. He pours coffee for himself while it steeps, then digs out the pint of grocery store brand ice cream that she hides in the back of the freezer before grabbing a single spoon from the silverware drawer.
“Did you get any sleep?” She asks, eyes tracing his face. He looks even more worn out than he had this morning. “You look exhausted.”
“A little,” Jack says as he sits back down on the couch. He places the two mugs in front of them before handing the ice cream to Samira. “A couple of hours before I got the call from daycare.”
“You should go to bed.”
“I’m good.”
She gives him a pointed look and he gives her one right back. Samira sighs.
“He’d just turned a year old.”
Jack doesn’t have to ask who he is.
* * *
6:00 P.M. (STILL)
“Thirteen month old male with extensive trauma to the upper neck and chest,” the paramedic said, helping push the gurney into one of the trauma rooms. “Thrown from the vehicle on impact.”
“He was in the accident?” One of the residents asked.
Another paramedic nodded. “Yeah, mom’s on the way now. She was at work and the kid was with a nanny. Rescue teams didn’t even know to look for him until Presby got word from the nanny’s emergency contact that she should have had a kid with her.”
“They didn’t check for a carseat in the car?” Samira asked as she assessed the toddler. He was covered in his own blood, curls several shades lighter than her own baby’s matted to his head, and barely moving as he cried out in pain. She knew, logically, that those cries were a good sign but nothing about this situation was “good” by any means. This boy was in a lot of trouble and it took everything not to let the image shake her.
“There wasn’t one in the car.”
* * *
“They didn’t check the car for a carseat?” Jack asks, taking a bite of ice cream off of Samira’s spoon. The tension caught between his eyebrows settles somewhere between the look of a confused, somewhat-reformed adrenaline junkie with field training for a crisis like this and a new father that still won’t leave the driveway without triple checking the baby seat in the back.
“That was my first question,” Samira replies as she brushes a loose curl out of her face. “But no, they did. We don’t know for sure but the paramedics at the scene don’t think it was installed correctly.”
Before tonight, she has never been more grateful for the months of research this man beside her put into every baby item they purchased– carseats, cribs, strollers. Even the pacifiers underwent Jack Abbot, MD’s stamp of approval.
“Goddamn.”
* * *
6:20 P.M.
“He’s crashing.”
The world seemed to spin around Samira. Nurses, residents, and her fellow attendings rushed in and out of the room as they pushed more drugs and called each and every beep on the monitors connected to the baby boy in front of her.
“Stay with me, buddy. Come on, stay with me,” she begged.
An already bad situation had gone so much further south much more quickly than anticipated. One minute they were making progress and the next… In the next, the toddler’s screams had weakened to whimpers as the team surrounding him gave their all. But just as soon, the cries had stopped, his pupils had blown, and his heart rate had dropped.
They were running out of time.
“Where’s neuro, dammit?” Samira said, exasperated. She wasn’t panicking, no, she had only panicked once during her career but she was desperate. Desperate to save the life of a little boy that shouldn’t remind her so much of the one she’d given birth to within the very four walls of this hospital.
“They’re on the way,” Santos said as she snapped on a fresh pair of gloves and pushed through the trauma room doors, “But Samira…”
The loud blare of machines mingled with the world outside of that room as a sob followed Trinity. After having spent most of her career in the emergency department, Samira would know that sound anywhere… The wail of a mother seeing her child on this table, the scream of a parent begging her to do something. To do anything.
She remembered how calm Robby had seemed the first time she saw it happen to him at the start of her residency, or the months later when she’d seen it happen to her now husband on the night shift. Jack had gone to the roof to get some air afterward, but not before pulling Samira into the quiet of an empty patient room once he saw the look on her face.
Are you okay, Dr. Abbot?
We did everything we could back there, Dr. Mohan. Just try to remember that you did everything that you could.
That was easier said than done.
Tonight, “everything she could” didn’t feel like enough. She pushed more and kept going longer than medically possible, all because she saw the face of a woman about her age trying to get to her baby. Her baby who she would never comfort again. Who she hadn’t even been there to comfort in the end.
“Time of death, 18:42.”
—
8:00 PM
Samira stood in the empty doorway of the trauma room nearly an hour after her shift was supposed to end, replaying the image of another woman holding a very still toddler in his arms. It wasn’t surprising that her own was on her mind; his first steps across the living room picking up speed over the last few months, his giggle every time Jack made the monster voices while reading their favorite book, the way that he alternated between “Mama” and “Amma” when he’s trying to get her attention.
Some of the day shift crew were still in the building as well, either catching up on charts or sticking by their most critical patients, and the others were too eager to know when to call it a night.
She used to be that way. Sometimes she still was.
Tonight though, she wasn’t exactly sure who she was… Someone’s doctor? Someone’s mother? Someone’s wife? She had mistakenly thought that maybe she wouldn’t be this person once she became a mom. It would be hard, she knew that, but a part of her thought that everything would just… Fall into place. The balance.
Dana’s voice came from behind her. “You okay, kid?”
In short, no. But Samira couldn’t bring herself to say it directly.
“She’s a lawyer, did you know that?”
“Who?”
“Sarah, the uh, mom of the little boy that we lost tonight. She told me that… She said that the paramedics asked her what he was wearing while they were trying to find him and she didn’t know. She just kept saying that she didn’t know.”
The sigh that comes from Dana tells her that she understands— that this is about something much more than the child that coded on her table a few hours earlier.
“Get out of here, Samira. Hug your husband, hold your kid. Take some time for yourself and get some sleep.”
* * *
“That gray onesie with the useless little pocket and the blue pants with the bear on the butt.”
“What?”
Jack gently brushes the stray tear from her face with the pad of his thumb. “That’s what he was wearing today. And the velcro shoes that he always kicks off in the car.”
Years into this, from late nights in the ED to rings and a house with a nursery, it still surprises Samira just how well this man sees her. He doesn’t just see through her, through the emotions that she hides and the facade she can’t help but put up, but her. Jack Abbot sees all of her and always has, and Samira isn’t sure she’ll ever understand how that comes so naturally to him.
“Samira, you’re a good mom,” Jack says sternly.
She shakes her head lightly, still unable to hide her own uncertainty under his gaze. “Am I though? We work so much and sometimes, I don’t even see him when I get home. He’s already in bed and I won’t see him until he cries at two in the morning and by then, I’m too exhausted to do anything but rock him back to sleep. Or if he… If he actually sleeps through the night, I have to get him up in the morning and rush out the door. I don’t want it to be that way. I don’t want to get that call one day that there’s been an accident and I don’t know what he’s wearing or if he’s safe.”
Jack nods in understanding. “But…?”
“But I love my job. I want to keep doing my job. I worked so hard to get here for such a long time and a part of me… A part of me feels so selfish for that because my dream now comes at the expense of our kid and—”
“Our kid.”
“What?”
“Do you feel like I’m selfish for working twelve hour shifts and only seeing him a couple hours a day when I do?”
Samira knows what he’s getting at and logically, she knows that he’s right. But she also knows the double standard. She sighs, “No.”
“Exactly,” Jack responds as he pulls her in closer. “I know that for as much as I miss you two while I’m at work, and for as guilty as I feel for not being here to trade-off with you most nights, it’s harder for you. There’s more pressure on you. More criticism. But fuck that. There has not been a single choice you’ve made that has been at the expense of that little boy. He loves you. He’s proud of you. Samira, I am proud of you.”
Tearing her brown eyes away from his hazel ones feels impossible in this moment, the glossiness drowning her like the wetness around her own.
“Baby, if we need to make changes, we’ll make them. We can pick out his outfits before bed so that you know exactly what he’s wearing when he isn’t with you. I’ll send you a picture if I change him. If you need to take some time, or take a step back at the hospital, I will make it happen. Hell, I’ll take one if that’s what you need. And if you don’t want to? You have nothing to feel guilty about. You are the best doctor that I have ever seen and I’ve known that for a long time, but nothing has shown me just how fucking incredible you are like watching you become a mom too.”
“You’re biased.”
“About a lot of things. But not that. Never that.”
Samira leans forward to burrow into his chest, trying to blink back the tears as he runs a hand through her hair. She isn’t naive. Again, she knew this would be hard— being a doctor and a mother. She knew that long before that second line turned pink. But she hadn’t expected to feel like she was failing something or someone all the time, and she hadn’t expected to see the face of the baby she grew with her own body on her table today. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t fair.
“Whatever you need, sweetheart. You’ve got me,” Jack whispers as he leaves a kiss on the crown of her head.
It feels like this was the part that had never been difficult; being with him. Years ago, when they were just two ships passing between night and day shifts, Jack Abbot had been her calm in the chaos of the emergency department. Words of encouragement had turned into debating case studies that turned into cups of coffee and stolen glances or lingering touches. The hardest part of it all had been staying away from him— knowing that she shouldn’t crave the feeling of a senior attending’s eyes on her, that she shouldn’t rely on the safety that she felt when he was next to her. She shouldn’t have kissed him in the ambulance bay on her last night of residency, and she shouldn’t have let him take her apart behind closed apartment doors twelve hours later.
She shouldn’t have done a lot of things but somehow, the easiest thing she had ever done was love him back. And back then, she never could have imagined that anything could scare her more.
“Do you hear me, Samira?” Jack says quietly into her hair. “I love you and you’ve got me.”
“I love you too,” Samira replies, more certain of that than anything else. “And I know that. I do. It’s just… I don’t know. Sometimes I think about who we used to be.”
“Pulling doubles and dodging bullets? Me, more than you on that last one, I guess.”
She laughs at that, feeling him smile against her head. “Yeah. I guess sometimes it’s just hard to reconcile who I was back then and who I am now. So much has changed, Jack. I used to be… Alone. And I avoided that by giving so much of my time to the hospital because I didn’t have a reason not to. Our family changed that.”
“You know that I understand that.”
“I do. It’s just that sometimes, I think about how much I gave the hospital in comparison to how much I give now and logically, I know that that’s how it should be. I would rather be here on this couch with you or even waking up with a teething baby at two in the morning than working doubles but then there are nights like tonight where I think… If I didn’t have this, if I didn’t have other priorities and if I didn’t panic because a patient reminded me of my child, then maybe he—“
“Samira.” Jack says sternly.
“And then I feel guilty because I watched this mother hold her son knowing that no matter how warm the blanket we wrapped him up in was, he would always be cold and all that I could think about was myself. She just kept ruminating on how much she worked and how she didn’t know what he was wearing and I realized that that was me.”
“Honey, you did everything you could.”
“Did I?! I was so busy not being enough for my patient that I didn’t even know my own kid was sick.”
“Samira, did you know where he was?”
“What?”
“Did you know where he was?”
“He was with you.”
“And do you trust me?”
Samira pulls back, lifting her head to look at him. “Of course I trust you.”
“Then you did everything you could for our son too. He was safe. I’m just as responsible for this family as you are and you know that. It’s why you felt comfortable enough not to check that text I sent you while you were doing your job. Because I’m his father and your partner. You did everything that you could. You did not fail anyone, especially not me or our kid,” Jack whispers those last words as his fingers follow the line of her jaw, his wedding band cool against her cheek. “We’re a team, Samira.”
She nods, trying to blink back the tears threatening to escape as Jack holds her gaze once again.
“You did everything that you could.”
And she did.
After a moment, her eyes leave her husband’s and find the baby monitor on the coffee table. There’s a bird’s eye view of their son from above his crib, short cropped dark curls drawing toward the outline of his face. He looks like Jack like this— not fuzzy from the camera’s quality, but when he sleeps. They have the same ears and the same nose, and there’s a peaceful glow that somehow overpowers the restlessness that she has found within them both.
Samira watches for another moment, looking for even breaths as the pixels around his body catch on movement. He’s okay.
She did everything she could.
“Looks like the Tylenol finally kicked in,” Jack says quietly.
“Mmhmm.”
When she finally turns her attention back to him, he’s still completely locked in on her. There’s a tenderness to the way that he’s watching her— a softness around his irises that spills out into the corners of his eyes until they meet the crinkles that she loves so much. Samira can’t help but finally let some of the weight from the day’s events melt away.
“Hi,” She whispers.
Jack smiles. “Hi.”
It’s that “there you are” he’s been fishing for since she got home, that headspace that he’s had to pull her out of a few times before. One that she has had to pull him from as well.
Leaning in, Samira nose nudges his, lips brushing against Jack’s mouth until he’s opening up to her. It’s slow and sweet and safe, tongues colliding, taking each other in. This won’t go any further tonight — it won’t even escalate beyond this — but it’s what she needs now. To feel him tangibly, with the tips of her fingers and nip of his teeth at her bottom lip.
Jack slows the kiss after a few minutes, pecking her lips one last time before he travels up to her temple.
“Do you think you’re ready to try to sleep?”
Samira thinks for a moment before nodding her head. Sleep won’t come easily, she’s prepared for that, but she is exhausted. She also knows that for as dead tired as the man in front of her is, he won’t get a wink of it.
* * *
“Mama.”
An echo on the baby monitor pulls her out of what little sleep she’s gotten, suddenly aware of the heavy arm draped around her waist. Jack’s hand is under her shirt, palm splayed across her stomach with the feel of his bare chest pressed up against her back.
Samira can tell by the rise and fall of his chest that he’s awake and probably has been the entire night.
“How long has he been up?” She asks, voice groggy from sleep.
“Few minutes,” Jack responds, curling into her just slightly more. His hand moves up to brush the hair away from her neck, leaving just enough space to place a kiss between it and the color of her — his — old t-shirt. “Figured if he wasn’t fussing, he’s okay.”
She nods.
“Dadadada. Mama. Amma. Mama.”
He chuckles.
“That’s our cue.”
“I can get him.”
Turning her head, Samira gives him a look that tells him that this is what she needs. She needs the normalcy of their mornings like this; mornings when they’re both actually home from work, waking up in bed together. Mornings where they’ll have slow, easy sex if they’re up before the one year old down the hall stirs, or where they’ll both go in to get him once he wakes them, only to fall into patterns of trading off bottles of milk and diaper changes while the other makes breakfast.
It’s grounding, keeping that routine.
Jack kisses her quickly before another call for “Mama” comes from the baby monitor and then they’re up. Samira takes a moment to put on a pair of sleep shorts while Jack opts for crutches instead of his prosthetic. It’s normal and easy, just like any other day off.
They head down the hall together, dodging a basket of laundry and a stuffed bear on the way. The door to the second bedroom is slightly ajar, a small patch of sunlight peaking out through a gap in the nursery’s dark blue curtains.
“Hi, buddy,” Samira whispers, opening the door the rest of the way to reveal a messy haired toddler standing up in his crib, fingers in his mouth as he grins at the sight of his parents. “Good morning.”
She lifts him from the crib and he clings, slobbery fingers sinking into the fabric of her shirt as he nestles into her. Samira kisses his forehead.
“He doesn’t feel warm anymore.”
Jack raises an eyebrow before lifting his right hand from his crutch to press against their son’s head. “Looks like fever broke, huh, bud?” His hand slides down after a moment, meeting Samira’s at his back. “You feeling a little better?”
He doesn’t answer, not that either of his parents expected it, but the question draws Jack’s eyes up to Samira’s. The concern from last night still lingers.
“How’s about his mom? How’s she doing this morning?”
Samira holds his gaze, looping a finger around his. “She’s doing a little better too.”