The Strength of the Pack (Suncoast Society #30)(73)

He nodded.

She waited, and finally asked, “Sir?”

“I’m sorry. Can…can I hold him?” He choked up. This wasn’t how he’d imagined their big day.

This wasn’t right at all. It should have been all four of them, and Laurel, together for the birth and welcoming him into their pack. A celebration.

Not…not just him, not a man barely in his right mind and unable to put sentences together standing here in a strange hospital in another county while he didn’t even know if his wife was going to survive.

“Yes, let us get everything set up.” The nurse brought a glider rocker into the bed area, one with a matching footstool, and then got Nate settled in with a pillow in his lap and warm blankets over his chest. Then, working together to transfer all the baby’s monitor leads and oxygen tube and IV lines over, the nurse and doctor got his baby settled in his arms before the doctor headed off, leaving him with the nurse and his son.

He stared down into the baby’s face and started crying again, not caring who saw him.

The nurse, apparently used to this, knelt next to him and provided a nonstop stream of tissues for him as she patiently answered his questions. He knew he probably asked the same ones several times, maybe even stuff the doctor had told him, but nothing was sticking.

Dammit, where the hell is Tilly?

“Can he eat? Is he hungry?”

“That’s what the nose tube is for,” she said. “Hopefully your wife will be able to pump breast milk, but we’ve got him on a special formula for now.”

He had a little blue stocking cap over his head, and tiny cloth mitts on his hands.

And even though they hadn’t settled on a name for him yet, he knew what he wanted to name him.

“The nurse at the other hospital needed his name,” he said.

“Yes, but we can fill that in later.”

“I know what his name is.”

“Are you sure? You can wait a little, if you want to talk to your wife first. It’s difficult to get a birth certificate changed once it’s issued.”

“She’ll be okay with this. It’s Kenneth Leonard Jesse Cooke-Morrow-Crawford.”

She wrote it down and stared at it. “That’s a mouthful,” she tried to joke. “Family names?”

“Yes. My step-father, and…” What were Leo and Jesse? “My brothers,” he said. “My brothers’ names.”

“You must be a very close family.”

He couldn’t take his eyes off his son. “We are.”





Chapter Twenty-Six


Nate startled awake at a touch on his shoulder. The nurse had taken Kenny, as Nate was already thinking of him, a little while ago and settled him back in his incubator bed. Then…

Then he’d nodded off before he could even get out of the chair.

In front of him knelt Tilly, looking far more haggard and drawn than he’d ever seen her, and still wearing, apparently, underneath the gown and mask and everything he also wore, the scrubs from earlier.

Last night?

Nate felt terrified to ask. “Is she—”

“In ICU when I left,” she said. “Critical, but stable. Leo and Jesse and Wade are there. Wade’s nearly a nurse. He knows enough to help them out with understanding what’s going on. Eva’s not conscious yet and probably won’t be until later today. They’re keeping her sedated for now in case they have to take her back to surgery a third time.”

He nodded. “What time is it?” The disorientation wouldn’t fade, tenaciously muddying his thoughts and brain to the point he wasn’t even sure if he was actually awake or not.

“Nearly nine. The supervisor let me in since you were here. Said you slept right through shift change and they didn’t have the heart to wake you up.”

“Bloody hell.”

He sat up. On the other side of the bassinet, a different nurse perched on a high stool, tapping notes into a laptop on a rolling stand.

She lifted her hand and smiled. “Hi, Dad. I’m Louisa, your son’s day nurse.”

He nodded, still feeling…

Wrong.

Tilly didn’t move, one hand on his arm, waiting on…something.

“What?” he asked. “What’s wrong?” It finally penetrated his brain. “Wait…surgery…a third time?”

That’s when Tilly blinked back tears and had to look down, away from him. The nurse quietly brought over a box of tissues and passed it to her before returning to her station.

That scared him more than anything, seeing Tilly cry.

She forced her mouth into a thin line, struggling to compose herself before her gaze focused somewhere just below his eyes. On his nose, or mouth, maybe, but she wouldn’t look him in the eye.

“Eva started bleeding again in recovery the first time. Hemorrhaging really bad. The first time, they fought and fought to get the bleeding to stop. This time, they had to make a hard decision, and fast.”

“What?”

“They had to do a partial hysterectomy. I’m so sorry.”

“Partial?”

“She’s still got her ovaries, but it was that, or risk her bleeding to death.”

He slumped back in the chair. “She can’t have any more children.”