The child was silent as he pulled it free. Eleven weeks early. With the edge of panic, he almost shook it, to make it start crying. A bad sign for the kind of parent he’d end up being, he thought. A good thing that Kelly took the child into her arms. He’d been warned by the prenatal nurse that it could feel like mothers had a nine month headstart into being a parent. He felt that now. He was glad for that warning, because he very much felt like Kelly was more ready for this.

The child didn’t cry as much as he’d anticipated, and its initial whimpers and complaints were easily shushed. He let Kelly have every moment, his focus purely on managing the wound he’d created.

She whispered to herself, like she tended to do when she was hearing the voices, but he liked to imagine she was introducing those voices to their child. A deeper connection.

“What do we name her?” Kelly asked. He wasn’t sure at first that she was talking to him, but the illumination from the glowing knife he’d stabbed into the back of one of the van’s seats gave him a view of her eyes.

“We could name her after you.”

“No,” Kelly said, firm.

There was some back and forth.

In the midst of it, her coherence faltering, Kelly passed the child to him, her arms almost too weak to manage the meager weight. He was just in time to catch it.

“You have her?” she asked.

‘Her’ had a penis, it seemed. He found himself caught in a dilemma.

“I have her,” he said. Kel had wanted a girl so badly. Had she not noticed? Or was she already that out of it?

“You’ll take good care of her. You took good care of me.”

He wasn’t sure, but he nodded. The glowing knife let them see each other. He was barely concerned with it. It was secondary, unimportant.

“The name,” she said.

He couldn’t give the child a girl’s name, and he couldn’t bring himself to provide a name he would later change. That would betray Kel.

“Addison,” he said. Gender neutral. And maybe if Kelly had been gifted like he’d been gifted, in this tomb of theirs, and she’d seen something in Addison, then the name should work then too.

“Good,” Kelly agreed.

The child missed Kelly’s warmth, and it might have wanted more of the meal it had been given. It might have disliked that cool waft of air that came in from the gaps in the mud above the broken window. He did what he could to bundle it up, and tucked it into his shirt, head poking out of his collar, the tiny body laying along the crook of his arm and armpit, head cresting near his chin.