I could swear I heard Brenda, her back to me, sniffle. “It so happens,” she interjected, “that there’s a shortcut to the elevator that passes through the neonatal unit. That might be the most, er, private way to get you back to your suite.”

Half an hour later, Brenda was steering me into the NICU, where I heard a disembodied array of beeping until I was parked neatly between two incubators.

“Bex,” I heard Nick say. “Meet your daughters.”

I turned my head to one side, then the other, to see two pink babies in pink knit caps lying snugly on their backs, with IVs and ID bracelets and narrow feeding tubes and any number of other alarming-looking things connecting them to their monitors. But the beeps were steady. The nurses were calm. And the girls had matching scowls on their faces as they scrunched their eyes closed, like they were desperate for a nap and very annoyed by all the fuss.

“Hello, babies,” I said to them, placing a hand on the clear plastic side of each incubator. “Welcome to the world.”

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER NINE

There you go, bug,” I cooed, taking my daughter from the nurse and nestling her against my chest. “Snuggle up for a nap.”

I had unbuttoned my shirt enough to rest her face against my skin. Nick was doing the same with her twin sister next to me, tipping his head back against the rocking chair and smiling in ecstasy.

“This is therapy,” he said. “I could do this all day.”

“Pretty soon you will, sir,” said the nurse on duty. “They’re thriving. They’ll be home before you know it.”

Once Bea knew the babies were safe, she’d sent out word of the premature delivery. Even though we wouldn’t have our girls in tow to show them, we’d agreed to speak to the assembled press and well-wishers when I was discharged. That had been two days ago. When I saw the ensuing footage of that appearance, it almost made me cry; Nick and I had looked like dazed, lovestruck fools when we walked out of the hospital’s glass double doors.

“The staff here were marvelous,” Nick had said as we stood there in front of over a hundred reporters from all over the world—all of whom were smiling directly at us, a detail I clearly remember because it had never happened to me before. “They had two terrified first-time parents on their hands, and they were strong and steady and calm, even when I tore my gown the first two times I tried to put it on by myself.”

A gentle laugh wafted through the crowd. I looked up at the building across from the hospital and realized that every window was crammed with people looking down at us, and before I could help myself, I waved up at them. Every one of them waved back.