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I read it. It's beautiful. Colour-coded by severity, twenty-two nodes, covering fever all the way to a box labelled "unexplained silence," and every path on the page, whatever the crisis, however many branches, terminates in the same final instruction: CALL ROSA.

"Peer-reviewed," Jax adds from the gift table, where he has positioned himself within reach of the crab puffs. "And field-tested on an actual toddler in the NICU. She was fine. The nurses threw a hissy fit when they caught me, but she was fine."

"There was a misunderstanding about authorisation," Max says.

"There was no misunderstanding. I understood I didn't have it."

Then Max validates his own gift, because Max does not give anything untested. He parks one unit beside Elena, carries the second to the far end of the parlour, and the entire room listens, in hospital-grade fidelity, to Jax eating a crab puff at forty feet.

"Range confirmed," Max says.

"That's the sound those babies you’re toting around are gonna fall asleep to," Jax tells Elena, toasting her with the remaining half.

Mamá drifts in from the kitchen. She reads the flowchart over my shoulder, all twenty-two nodes, and arrives where every path arrives.

"Correct," she says, and goes back to the kitchen.

The most useful object anyone will hand us this year.

Mamá’s gift needs two trips to bring in. It’s a tower of Tupperware, thirty-one containers, each labelled in her block handwriting with specific heating instructions. A month of dinners, cooked and frozen in advance, because in July nobody in this house will cook, and she knows it, and this is what her love looks like when it’s ahead of schedule. Preston reads the labels one by one like correspondence.

Then she crosses to Preston with a second parcel – flat, rectangular, wrapped in actual paper. Everyone who knows Mamá goes quiet at that. Her Tupperware never gets paper.

“For you,” she says. “Not the babies. You.”

Preston unwraps it, and the room divides instantly into two populations: the ones who don’t understand what they’re looking at, and the ones who do.

It’s a flattened cardboard box. Breville Barista Express. Preston’s Dignity Box. Years in a hospital locker have not been kind to it, and it doesn’t matter, because Preston has gone the colour of the tissue paper.

For the record, since somebody in this family should finally chart it: Years ago, my mother let herself into my apartment on the morning after our first night together and found my future husband while he was wearing nothing but that box. She has kept the Dignity Box flattened in her locker ever since. She calls it insurance. Preston once offered her Italian marble and a barista named Fabio for its release. Her answer was: when I retire.

“I said until I retire,” Mamá tells him now, level as a verdict. Then she looks at Elena’s stomach. “You’re giving me grandbabies. Sentence commuted.”

Jax chokes on a crab puff. Elena looks from the cardboard to Preston to me. “What is the box?”

“Nothing,” Preston and I say, together.

Preston holds the flattened carton to his chest – which, historically, is not where he held it – and his eyes are doing what they did in no boardroom ever.

“It makes excellent espresso,” he says, thickly, which is what he said the first time, and which everyone in the original cast understands to mean thank you, and also the other thing.

“I know,” Mamá says. “Conical burrs.” And she pats his cheek once and returns to her chair.

Rosenthal’s gift makes Elena laugh so hard she snorts, which sets off a nurse, which then sets off the room. Inside the box: two infant-sized tracksuits in metallic gold, two pairs of infant sunglasses, and a card reading FOR THE V.I.P. SECTION. “They’re Italian,” he says, wounded by our laughter. “Velour. You can’t buy these retail.”

At 14:40 a van pulls up outside with diplomatic plates. Nobody signs for anything; the driver simply leaves a crate at the front door and leaves.

The crate contains a case of baby formula labelled as made in Switzerland with customs paperwork in nine languages. A biometric thumbprint seal and a heavily redacted NDA reveal it is an experimental micro-batch currently undergoing covert field testing by a notoriously secretive Seattle tech billionaire's philanthropic foundation. The nutritional label is entirely classified and mostly redacted. Instead, an alarmingly cheerful warning pamphlet lists the likely side effects of the proprietary neuro-ingredients.

The pamphlet notes that while the baby formula guarantees a baseline IQ of 160 by toddlerhood, parents should be prepared for spontaneous firmware updates during scheduled naptime and burps that may sound exactly like a 1998 AOL dial-up modem. It includes a toll-free number for pediatric IT support, specifically for instances where the baby refuses to latch without successful two-step verification. A brightly coloured sidebar warns that the infant's digestive tract may inadvertently begin mining cryptocurrency, resulting in exceptionally warm diapers and a sudden spike in the household electric bill. Furthermore, parents are advised to keep the child at least ten feet away from smart appliances to prevent them from overriding the refrigerator's mainframe and ordering three tons of organic strained peas. Finally, it notes that the child may emit a low-frequency Wi-Fi signal, and that if their eyes glow a solid blue, they are not possessed by demons. They are buffering.

Beneath the formula are two car seats of a brand sold on no continent I can confirm. They appear to be upholstered in a material typically reserved for the heat shields of atmospheric reentry vehicles. A quick inspection reveals they feature built-in G-force dampeners, a five-point harness that suspiciously resembles a high-altitude parachute rig, and cup holders that appear to be engineered to survive a direct blast from a tactical explosive.

Nestled between the seats is a heavy cardstock note:

The seats are rated for altitudes you should not need, but any relative of the Kensington family always comes prepared. Love, Sloane Kensington.

Then Catherine stands, and the room quiets itself without being asked, because she’s Catherine.