Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 112961 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 565(@200wpm)___ 452(@250wpm)___ 377(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112961 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 565(@200wpm)___ 452(@250wpm)___ 377(@300wpm)
Petting her tiny fist, I gently uncurl her tight little fingers, kissing each one. The sweet crescent moons of her fingernails are a miracle. My heart is too small for these feelings; the sense of choking on happiness, of drowning in it, hits me every few breaths. “I’m your Auntie Fizzy,” I whisper. “I will never let you suffer an ill-fitting bra. I’ll tell you when you have food in your teeth. I’m the one you come to when you need clothing advice or spending money. I only ask that you let me vet every person you want to date.”
“Okay, okay. Give her back.”
I make a strangled, infatuated noise and pass her back into Alice’s outstretched arms. I’ve been in this room for just over forty-eight hours and am going on roughly three hours of sleep, but I’ve never felt more energized. Alice, though, looks like she’s about to drop. Labor was intense. My sweet baby sister spent twenty-six hours pacing the room in early labor before fifteen hours of active labor and an epidural that didn’t take. An obstetrician himself, her husband, Henry, was on the verge of insisting the doctor wheel her in for a C-section, but as if little Helena heard her daddy and decided enough was enough, she came out with one more push, bright-eyed and with only a tiny, shocked cry of protest. She’s not even a day old, but already the room is packed with people and flowers, gifts and balloons.
Mom comes up behind me, sliding her arms around my waist from behind, and we peer together at baby Lena in Alice’s arms.
“She is perfect,” Mom whispers.
“She redefines the word perfection,” I agree.
“I remember holding you,” she says, “and this new feeling pushing everything else away. I had everything I needed in that moment. It’s still like that, every time I look at you.”
Bittersweet warmth threads through me. I never feel so loved as when I’m with my family… and I hate knowing I might never give my mother this magnitude of a gift: a grandchild, someone else to love unconditionally in the way only she can.
But being the mother she is, she already knows what I’m thinking. She turns me to face her. “You were perfect then, too, and you are perfect now.”
Eyes watery, I laugh. “You are not a credible source.”
“I am the only credible source. I’ve known you every second of your life.”
I have no walls left up to hold things in. I clutched my screaming sister’s hand for the past day, watched her experience brutal pain and blinding joy. With nearly everyone I love packed into this room, crowding around Alice and Henry and Helena, I feel stripped down, a live wire. “I might never do what Alice just did,” I remind Mom. “I might never even get married. I might never write the kind of book you want me to write. I might always be exactly like this.”
“So?”
“So?” I repeat. “So I don’t want to disappoint you.”
Mom cups my face in her hands. “You look in the mirror and see all of the ways you are letting me down. I look at you and see everything I’ve ever wanted you to be. That admiration is where expectations come from, dai leu, not from disappointment. And if I want something for you, like marriage or a baby, it’s because these things have made me happier than anything else in life. You spend so much time working to make other people happy, and all I care about is that you are happy.”
The way these words drag Connor’s face front and center in my mind’s eye is startling. He is, without question, the current seat of my happiness, and if there is anything about the show ending that makes me sad, it’s the reality that I won’t see him every day.
And then a new jarring thought crashes in.
“Mom,” I ask, “what day is it?”
She blinks at me, confused. “Thursday.”
I look at the clock. It’s a quarter to five in the evening and if it is indeed Thursday, then I am an hour away from the wrap party that begins in fifteen minutes.
I lean over Alice, kissing her forehead. “I’ll be back later tonight.”
“Where are you going?” she asks without taking her eyes off her newborn.
“Wrap party.”
Finally, Alice turns her dark, tired eyes to me. “Tell him you love him.”
I’ve started to turn, but pause at her words. “What?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
I stare at her. I haven’t talked about Connor with anyone but Jess, too worried about it getting out, too worried about stressing out my pregnant sister, too worried about my show already outshining my brother’s wedding, too worried that the show was yet another embarrassing stain on my résumé as far as my family was concerned. But in the end, the people who love you see through all the subterfuge anyway.