Adrian looked up sharply, startled by the tiny complaint. I unfastened the carrier and lifted her carefully into my arms, rocking her against my shoulder. She opened her mouth, made a wounded little cry, then settled when I whispered her name.
Adrian watched as if seeing a language he had never learned.
“May I…” He stopped. Tried again. “May I see her?”
I hesitated.
His expression did not harden. He did not demand. That mattered, though not enough to erase everything.
I shifted Rose gently so he could see her face.
He leaned closer, keeping a respectful distance. Rose stared at him with calm curiosity, one tiny hand opening and closing in the air.
“She looks like you,” he said.
“She looks like both of us.”
The words surprised me.
Maybe they surprised him too.
He smiled then—not the public smile from newspaper photographs, but a smaller, uncertain thing. Rose answered by grabbing at the edge of my coat.
Something painful moved through his eyes.
“I missed everything,” he whispered.
“Yes.”
Her first cry. Her first bath. The first time she gripped my finger with shocking strength. The nights she would not sleep unless I walked the apartment from window to door and back again. The morning she smiled at the cracked ceiling fan as if it had told her a secret.
Adrian had missed all of it.
But Rose had not missed him.
