I held on.
Dax, on my other side, put his hand over both of ours.
The three of us in the April morning, and Okafor's calm voice narrating the first of the clinical landmarks, and the pack facility quiet and prepared around us, and somewhere on the thirty-eighth floor Eleanor Wolfe sitting in a chair with her hands folded and her pearls and her eighty-one years of waiting for this pack to produce exactly this child.
Eight hours.
Okafor had said eight to twelve.
It was, in fact, nine hours and forty minutes, which was exactly the kind of specific duration that a pregnancy of this particularity would produce: not the fastest, not the longest, but entirely its own.
And then she arrived.
Not quietly — Isolde Henrik Wolfe, consistent with everything else she had done for nine months, arri
