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Day seven, the doll has survived, in the sense that a town survives a hurricane. One sock missing. A faint smell of chamomile tea from an incident we’ve agreed to never discuss. Elena, who declined all participation on the grounds that she is “doing the hardware, not the software,” passes it on the stairs, looks at it, looks at us, and says, “Your baby has seen things I don’t think it can come back from. You sure you’re going to pass that class?”

We return it on Saturday. Amber plugs the doll into her laptop, reads the data log in silence, and looks up at us.

“I want to start by saying that you both clearly worked very hard this week,” she says. “I also have to inform you that, per the doll’s logs and the corresponding state regulations, your baby is technically dead.”

Silence.

“Hmmm.” She scrolls. Frowns. Turns the doll over, checks the dial on its back, and her eyebrows rocket upward. “Well, that’s odd. This unit was set to fussy mode. That’s – hm. That’s the training setting for NICU staff who are learning to handle premature newborns, and even they cheat and turn it down half the time. You were never assigned this. You survived the hardest version. Most couples quit by day two and they’re on easy mode.” She closes the laptop and stamps our completion card. “Congratulations, you passed! Would you like to keep the doll as a memento of your course? I certainly think you’ve earned it!”

Luke takes the stamped card, while glaring at the doll.

“We’re doctors,” he says. “We don’t quit. We survive.”

“Regardless, we’ll see the doll in Hell,” I add.

Chapter 16

The Shower

LUKE

Hour fourteen of a twelve-hour shift, and my brain has started routing calls through the old switchboard.

I’m at the board reviewing beds when Nowak asks me the renal-adjusted ceiling on ketorolac, which is a good question, the right question, the kind I’d want her asking.

“Quince miligramos,” I tell her. “Y revisa la creatinina primero.”

She blinks at me. I blink back. Somewhere in my head, a door I didn’t open is standing open.

“Just Google it,” I say, and walk away.

Here’s what a week of a fussy-mode doll plus a seven-and-a-half-months-pregnant sister plus twin-prep insomnia does to a bilingual brain: it strips the recent construction and leaves the foundation. English is the language I learned medicine in. Spanish is the language I learned everything else in first – counting, praying, apologising, being fed. Exhaustion doesn’t care about credentials. Exhaustion sends you home.

Ten minutes later there’s a café con leche at my elbow. I didn’t hear her put it down. Thirty years of charge nursing will teach you to move through a department without displacing air.

Mamá doesn’t mention the Spanish. She doesn’t mention my father, either – we haven’t spoken about him since the dinner, not once, and Elena will have told her weeks ago that he asked and that I said no and that he’s gone. The coffee is the conversation. It’s made the way she made it when I was nine and sick and home from school: too much milk, cinnamon she’d deny under oath. I drink it standing at the board and she stays a moment longer than the task requires.

“Sunday,” she says. “Two o’clock. Wear the blue shirt I got you for Christmas.”

“It’s my house, Mamá. I know when the baby shower is.”

“Fourteen hundred,” she says, and goes back to her station. Proud of something. Not the medicine.

By 13:40 on Sunday, the brownstone holds more worlds than the parlour floor was zoned for.

York world arrived first and is behaving itself: Max at the window with Jax, who is eating from a tray he has stationed himself beside with military intent. St. Jude’s world is in the kitchen, out of instinct – nurses colonise kitchens; it’s where the supplies are. Elena is enthroned on the good couch with her feet up on an ottoman Catherine ordered when Elena’s ankles began to swell, at seven and a half months and accepting tribute. And at 14:00 exactly, the doorbell rings, and it’s Dr. Rosenthal, who was not invited so much as he informed us he was coming.

He’s in seafoam green today. The lapels could land small aircraft. He hands me a bottle of champagne with both hands and a small bow, and I look at the label and do the math and set it down very carefully, because it cost more than my first car, including the repairs that outlived the car. It was admittedly more rust than vehicle when I bought it.

“For the bris,” he says, “or the christening, or the Wednesday. Whichever arrives first. It doesn’t judge.”

The gifts happen in the parlour, and I stand at the edge of it.

Max and Jax open their gifts to us first, because Max carries an internal schedule and the schedule has all of us on it.

They bring two hospital-grade infant monitors, cases already labelled A and B in Max's block capitals, and a laminated one-page emergency flowchart. Max hands over the flowchart separately, with both hands, the way other men deliver deeds.

"It's a decision tree," Max says. "Every branch ends in an action. There is no scenario in which you will not know what to do next."