I didn’t say anything. We sat in silence for a while. The clock on the mantel ticked. Somewhere in the kitchen, my dad was making a lot of noise rearranging pots that didn’t need rearranging. Making sure we knew he was there.
“What’s in the bag?” I asked.
Ben looked down like he’d forgotten he was holding it. He held it out to me, then hesitated, then set it on the coffee table between us instead.
I opened it.
It was a hospital bracelet. The one for fathers. The one he never came back to get at check-in.
“I went back to the hospital,” he said. “I asked the nurses if they still had it. The one with our names. I know it’s stupid. They thought I was crazy. But one of them, the nurse with the purple scrubs, she remembered you. And she found it in a drawer at the nurses’ station. She said she’d kept it because she had a feeling someone would come back for it.”
I held the little plastic bracelet in my fingers. It had his name and the hospital’s name and a barcode and the same number that was on my bracelet and on Evelyn’s tiny ankle bracelet.
Mother, father, daughter. A set.
I looked at Ben. He was crying again, very quietly, trying not to.
“Do you want to hold her?” I asked.
He looked up at me like I’d hit him.
“Are you sure?”
“Support her head,” I said. “She hates it when you don’t support her head.”
I stood up and walked over and put our daughter in his arms for the very first time.
He held her like she was made of glass. Exactly like I’d seen him hold his cousin’s baby at that barbecue, years ago. Like his heart was breaking.
Evelyn blinked up at him. She looked at his face for a long moment with her serious, unfocused newborn eyes.
