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Erling had spent the last nine months insisting that he didn’t care who the baby looked like.
Every time Jude asked, usually while standing sideways in front of the bathroom mirror with both hands beneath his stomach, Erling gave him the same answer.
“I only care that he’s healthy.”
It was the correct answer. It was also true.
Jude never let him get away with it.
“That’s not what I asked.”
“It is what matters.”
“You’re avoiding the question.”
“I’m being a responsible father.”
“You’re being annoying.”
Then Erling would come up behind him, fit his hands over Jude’s and rest his chin carefully on his shoulder. He would stare at their reflection and try to imagine the small person they had made together.
“Your eyes,” he sometimes admitted.
Jude always smiled. “You want him to have my eyes?”
“Maybe.”
“Anything else?”
“My height.”
“Absolutely not.”
“He could be a goalkeeper.”
“He could terrify every other child in nursery.”
Erling would laugh, kiss the side of Jude’s neck and feel the baby move beneath their joined hands. Every time it happened, he went quiet. Nine months had not made it feel ordinary.
Nothing could have prepared him for the reality of it.
Their son arrived early on a rainy Tuesday morning, red-faced, furious and much louder than anyone so small had a right to be.
Erling cried before the baby did.
He denied this later, but Jude had been there. Jude had watched his face crumple the second that first cry filled the room. He had watched Erling cover his mouth with one trembling hand, tears already spilling down his cheeks while he kept the other locked around Jude’s fingers.
“He’s here,” Erling said, as though Jude might not have noticed. “Jude, he’s here.”
Jude was too exhausted to laugh properly. “I know.”
When the nurse placed the baby against Jude’s chest, Erling moved so close that his forehead bumped Jude’s temple. For several minutes, neither of them said anything.
Their son had stopped crying almost immediately. He lay tucked beneath the blanket, one tiny fist pressed beside his face, his damp curls flattened against his head.
Erling touched one finger to the baby’s cheek.
“Hello,” he whispered.
The baby opened his eyes.
They were dark and unfocused, blinking slowly at a world he had only just entered. Erling made a sound Jude had never heard from him before, somewhere between a laugh and a sob.
“Oh, no.”
Jude turned his head. “What?”
“He has your eyes.”
“You can’t tell that already.”
“I can.”
“All newborns look like confused potatoes.”
Erling looked genuinely offended. “He does not look like a potato.”
“A very beautiful potato.”
“Jude.”
Jude smiled weakly and Erling kissed him, lingering against his forehead afterward.
“Thank you,” Erling murmured.
Jude’s eyes stung. “He’s yours too.”
“I know, but you…” Erling glanced down at him, apparently unable to decide whether he meant Jude or the baby. In the end, he looked at both. “You did everything.”
“Not everything.”
That earned him a watery laugh.
“Still,” Erling said, brushing his thumb beneath Jude’s eye. “Thank you.”
The first three weeks passed in fragments.
There were bottles on the kitchen counter, muslin cloths over every chair and stretches of night that seemed to last for days. Erling became obsessed with tracking feeds and naps in an app until Jude threatened to delete it. Jude cried one afternoon because he dropped the last clean dummy on the floor. Then Erling cried too, although he claimed that was only because Jude crying made him emotional.
Their son, whom they named Elias, remained unimpressed by both of them.
He liked being held upright against Erling’s chest. He hated having his clothes changed. He could sleep through the television, the blender and Jude dropping a pan in the kitchen, but woke immediately if either of his fathers dared to sit down while holding him.
He also looked more like Jude every day.
Erling noticed it first in the shape of his eyes. Then it was the curve of his mouth, the tiny crease beside his nose when he was about to sneeze, and the serious expression he wore whenever he studied the ceiling fan.
“That’s your thinking face,” Erling said one morning.
Jude looked up from his cereal. “He’s six weeks old. He isn’t thinking.”
“Of course he is.”
“About what?”
“Important baby things.”
“Such as?”
“Milk. His elephant toy. Ways to keep us awake.”
Jude watched Erling bounce Elias gently beside the kitchen table. The baby wore a yellow sleepsuit and one sock, having kicked the other into a location neither of them could find. His eyes followed Erling’s face with deep concentration.
“He has your nose,” Jude offered.
Erling frowned. “No, he doesn’t.”
“Yes, he does.”
“His nose is tiny.”
“So yours wasn’t tiny when you were a baby?”
“I was born with this nose.”
Jude laughed into his cereal.
At eight weeks, Elias smiled for the first time.
Jude was the one holding him. They were sitting on the living-room floor in the middle of a disastrous attempt at tummy time, which Elias usually endured for thirty seconds before protesting as if they had betrayed him personally.
That morning, he lifted his head, stared at Jude and gave him a wide, gummy smile.
Jude gasped. “Erling.”
Erling came running from the kitchen with a bottle in one hand. “What happened?”
“He smiled.”
“At you?”
“Yes.”
Erling dropped to his knees hard enough to shake the coffee table.
“Do it again,” Jude told the baby.
Elias blinked at him.
“Come on, sweetheart. Show Papa.”
Erling leaned so close his hair fell over his shoulders. “Elias.”
The baby stared at him, then turned his face toward Jude’s voice.
Jude smiled and made the ridiculous popping sound that had worked the first time.
Elias’s whole face lit up.
There they were.
Two tiny dimples, one in each cheek.
Erling went completely still.
Jude looked from the baby to him. “Are you okay?”
Erling sat back on his heels.
“Oh my God,” he whispered.
“What?”
“He has your dimples.”
Jude glanced down. Elias was still smiling, legs kicking against the blanket as if pleased with the chaos he had caused.
“I suppose he does.”
Erling put the bottle on the table and covered his face with both hands.
“Are you crying?” Jude asked.
“No.”
“You are.”
“I’m tired.”
“Your shoulders are shaking.”
Erling lowered his hands. His eyes were red and his cheeks were wet.
“Look at him.”
“I am looking at him.”
“He looks exactly like you.”
Jude couldn’t help laughing. “This feels slightly insulting. I hope I don’t look like a two-month-old.”
“You know what I mean.” Erling wiped his face with the heel of his hand, but more tears replaced the first ones. “It’s your whole smile, Jude.”
Something in his voice took the humour out of Jude’s answer.
He reached across the blanket and touched Erling’s knee. “Come here.”
Erling moved around the baby and sat beside him. Jude leaned against his shoulder, leaving Elias between their bent legs.
“I hoped he would,” Erling admitted.
“I know. You told me.”
“No, I mean really hoped.”
Jude tilted his face to look at him.
Erling was watching their son. His expression had gone soft in the way it only did at home, far away from stadiums, cameras and people expecting him to be larger than life.
“When we first started talking about having a baby,” he continued, “I used to look at your childhood pictures.”
“You did what?”
“Your mum sent them to me.”
“My mother is a traitor.”
“You were always smiling. In every picture, even when half your teeth were missing.”
“I was a happy child.”
“I know.” Erling traced one finger over Elias’s curled fist. “That’s what I wanted. Not only your face. I wanted him to have that happiness too.”
Jude swallowed past the tightness in his throat.
“Well, that part is up to us, isn’t it?”
Erling looked at him.
“We make sure he’s happy,” Jude said. “Or as happy as he can be, until we refuse to buy him something and he tells us we’ve ruined his life.”
“I will buy it for him.”
“That is exactly what I’m worried about.”
“Look at his face. How am I supposed to say no?”
“He doesn’t even know how to ask for things yet.”
“He will learn.”
“And you’ll be useless.”
“Probably.”
As if he understood that the conversation concerned him, Elias turned toward Erling and smiled again.
Erling’s mouth fell open.
“See?” he said. “It’s impossible.”
“He’s two months old and already figured you out.”
“Smart like you too.”
Jude rolled his eyes, though he was smiling. He picked Elias up and settled him against his chest. The baby gave one long yawn before tucking his face beneath Jude’s chin.
Erling watched them with the same stunned look he had worn in the hospital.
“Stop staring,” Jude murmured.
“I can’t.”
“You see us every day.”
“I know.”
Erling shifted closer, wrapping one arm around Jude’s waist. With the other hand, he cupped the back of Elias’s head, palm almost large enough to cover it completely.
“I keep thinking I’ll get used to it,” he said.
“To what?”
“Coming downstairs and finding both of you here. Knowing he’s ours.”
Jude rested his head against Erling’s shoulder. “Are you disappointed he doesn’t look more like you?”
“No.”
The answer came so quickly that Jude laughed.
“Not even a little?”
Erling considered their son with exaggerated seriousness. “He has my toes.”
“Your toes?”
“Definitely.”
“That’s what you’re claiming?”
“And my appetite.”
“He drinks milk.”
“A lot of milk.”
Jude turned his face into Erling’s neck, trying not to wake the baby with his laughter.
They stayed on the floor until Elias fell fully asleep. Erling refused to put him in the cot, claiming that moving him would be cruel after such an exhausting morning of smiling twice. Jude knew better than to argue. Instead, he found his phone on the sofa and took a picture.
Erling sat with his back against the couch, Elias asleep on his chest. One enormous hand rested protectively over the baby’s back. His eyes were still damp, but he was smiling down at him as if nothing else in the room existed.
“Send me that,” Erling said without looking up.
“You didn’t even see it.”
“Send it anyway.”
Jude did.
It became Erling’s lock screen before the baby woke.
Months later, when Elias learned how to laugh, Erling cried again.
He cried the first time the baby reached for him, the first time he said something that sounded vaguely like Papa and the first time he stood on unsteady legs between them. Jude teased him every single time, then went into the bathroom and cried where Erling couldn’t see.
By Elias’s first birthday, the resemblance was undeniable. He had Jude’s brown eyes, Jude’s dimples and Jude’s wide smile. He ran through the house on uncertain feet, laughing whenever Erling pretended he could not catch him.
Erling could always catch him.
He simply liked the moment Elias turned around to check that he was still following.
At the birthday party, Jude’s mother brought a box of old photographs. Someone placed one of Jude at the same age beside a picture taken of Elias that morning, and soon everyone was passing them around, marvelling at how they could have been the same child.
Erling sat at the end of the table with Elias in his lap, comparing the pictures for what must have been the twentieth time.
“He is your copy,” he told Jude.
“So you’ve mentioned.”
Elias twisted around at the sound of Jude’s voice. The second he spotted him, his face opened into that enormous smile.
Erling looked down at it, then up at Jude.
His eyes filled immediately.
“Oh, come on,” Jude said, laughing as he crossed the room. “You can’t still be surprised.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“Then why are you crying?”
Erling pulled him close with his free arm, pressing his face against Jude’s stomach while Elias happily squashed himself between them.
“Because now there are two of you,” he mumbled.
Jude ran his fingers through Erling’s hair. “Is that so terrible?”
Erling lifted his head. Jude was smiling down at him, and Elias was smiling up at Jude, matching dimples deep in their cheeks.
“No,” Erling said, holding them both tighter. “It’s everything.”