Part 4
Nathan closed his mouth. “Give her the time.”
Then he faced Arthur. “She told you to stay outside.”
Arthur began, “Nathan—” but Nathan stood beside him until he stepped back into the corridor, then closed the door.
Dr. Shah asked Claire who she wanted to remain.
“The surgeon, the advocate, Dr. Shah, and Nathan.”
The neurosurgeon drew two simple shapes on the whiteboard: the skull, the collection beneath it. He divided the decision into three parts and paused after each. Claire asked for the risk of waiting to be explained a second time. She looked at the drawing, at June’s clay figure on the bedside table, and then stated in her own words what could happen with surgery and without it.
The neurosurgeon documented that Claire understood the essential choice, and the advocate witnessed the process. Claire signed her own consent.
Only afterward, with the advocate and a nurse as witnesses, did she complete a health care power of attorney naming Rosa as her agent if she could no longer make or communicate her own decisions. Nathan read Rosa’s name and returned the pen to the advocate.
“Will you stay with June?” Claire asked him.
“Yes.”
Rosa stayed too. June sat between her and Nathan in the waiting area, using modeling clay from the pediatric cart to make a rabbit with one huge ear. Nathan tried to make a person, but his thumbs flattened the head.
“That’s terrible,” June said.
“Your first figure was better?”
“No. But I was three.”
Across the room, Arthur sat with his phone facedown on his knee. At one point June carried him a lump of green clay. He accepted it as carefully as if it were evidence and made nothing from it.
The neurosurgeon came out before noon. The procedure had gone as planned. The pressure was relieved, and Claire was awake enough to follow commands. Recovery would take time.
No old memory returned in a rush. During the first week, Claire’s balance improved before her headaches did. She remembered Nathan’s habit of folding sugar packets into triangles but not the apartment where they had lived. She recalled the courthouse clerk’s peppermint breath and then forgot Jonah had been their witness. Some mornings Nathan’s face reached her as memory; on others, it belonged only to the man who arrived at nine with coffee and waited to be invited in.
Three weeks later, the result of the legal paternity test Claire had requested arrived at the recovery apartment. She read it first, then slid it across the table to June. June found Nathan’s name twice on the page.
“Do I have to call you something different now?”
“No.”
She pushed the report back to Claire and asked Nathan to open the jam. For nearly four more months, he remained Nathan.
Tuesday pickups began with Rosa beside June at the studio door. The first week, June made Nathan tell Claire where they were going and what time they would return. The second, she carried Claire’s phone number in the front pocket of her backpack, though she knew it by heart. By the fifth Tuesday, she came outside before Nathan reached the door, but still looked back until Claire lifted a hand from the window. Nathan never asked her to stop checking.
Arthur sent the private firm’s lead report through Jonah. Claire read the caption naming herself and her infant daughter, then closed the folder. When Arthur asked whether she would hear his apology, she said not yet. He stayed away unless invited.
Five months after the surgery, Nathan waited by the studio sink while Claire finished her Tuesday class. She was teaching four adults how to brace one hand with the other when strength or coordination failed. Her hair had grown enough to cover the surgical scar, though she often tucked it back while she taught. When class ended, Claire wiped her hands and came toward him.
At the children’s table, June was building three figures on one oval base. They did not hold hands. One had Claire’s short hair, one wore Nathan’s blue coat, and the smallest had purple paint across both knees.
“Dinner Saturday?” Nathan asked. “Your place or mine?”
They still lived separately, though their marriage had never legally ended. Claire considered.
“Mine,” she said. “Bring two bags of groceries, not six.”
June groaned. “You’re making rules about bags again.”
Nathan sat beside her. “Can I fix the blue one’s arm?”
“If you don’t squash him.”
He pressed too hard.
“Dad, you’re squashing him.”
Nathan’s hand stopped. He kept his eyes on the clay.
“Sorry.” He lifted his thumb.
June nudged the three damp figures closer and returned to painting their shoes.