Page 74 of Always Alchemy

And so I sit here in the almost dark, as close to my wife as I can get without intruding, gazing transfixed at the wonderful sight of our tiny son suckling on her, of his head, so soft and so much tinier than her breast, of the workings of his jaw and cheeks and mouth against her skin. She lies back against her pillow, serene and still half-asleep, while I keep a useless, awe-filled vigil.

For so long, I thought wives and babies were inevitable, but I approached that kind of inevitability as one would the likelihood of rain on a bank holiday weekend—with stoicresignation. While I wouldn’t have resisted it, I wasn’t excited about it.

But this.

This.

Oh my God. This is heaven, right here on this earth, the very same heaven I’ve been told will never be my fate in the next life: Darcy’s contented breaths, and the sweet little sucks and gulps of our son, and the knowledge that, one floor below us, the man we both fell in love with has taken a few hours of refuge from worrying about us and caring for us and trying to anticipate every obscure need we might ever, ever have.

That people like my father truly believe that what Max and Darcy and I have here is godless and unnatural and sinful and deviant—it’s unthinkable. This love, this life, this family we’re building is the most beautiful, natural,rightthing I could ever imagine, the bounties it’s bestowed upon us already so plentiful it’s intoxicating.

Some force out there has blessed us with such abundance, such happiness, and I will take that blessing as a sign that what we have is good and true and pure; I will double down and pledge every breath I have to these three people and however more may see fit to join us. I’ll cut out the sceptics and the naysayers and raise the drawbridges and camp out on this island with this family and never, ever, let anyone hurt them or disparage them or shame them.

I thought this week would be bittersweet. I thought Dad’s absence at the hospital when all the grandparents came to meet Charlie would be a void, a blemish on what should have been the perfect day.

It wasn’t. On the contrary, it felt right that the only people allowed into that fragile, hallowed inner sanctum should be those people who were wholeheartedly,stupendously delighted for us all. It wasn’t a day for censure; it was a day for giving thanks, for marvelling at how the simple joy ten tiny, perfect fingers and toes can bring a roomful of sophisticated adults to their knees.

My son and his siblings will know a very different type of family unit from the one within which Belle and I grew up. But some things will stay the same.

Darcy’s parents, who are over the moon at having a grandchild by blood, have expressed their interest in being known as Nana and Gramps.

And, if the way Mum and Charles were behaving when they thought no one was looking the other day is anything to go by, I suspect they may end up being Granny and Grandpa.

In fact, I’d put money on it.

26

GENETIC KARMA

ADAM

It looks as though a staggeringly incompetent decorator has been applying wallpaper paste to the usually immaculate marble of my kitchen island.

It’s not wallpaper paste, of course.

It’s porridge. Porridge with added cashew nut butter for slower energy release, obviously. When you have a diabetic wife, you obsess a little too much over that stuff.

And it’s not the handiwork of an incompetent decorator. More an obscenely naughty three-year-old girl.

I give her my most withering glare, and she, in turn, graces me with her bestgive a fucklook.

Hers is better.

Also, she has her mother’s eyes, which helps her cause every fucking time.

‘Grace Ellen Wright,’ I say sternly. ‘Look at the mess you made.’

‘Sorry, Daddy,’ her meek little voice says.

We both know I’m not in the least bit sorry, so don’t waste my goddamn time,those huge brown eyes say.

Dammit. I knew I should have paid more attention to that dangerously mutinous gene in my otherwise perfect wife before we procreated.

I narrow my eyes, assessing my options. If I don’t, she’ll have me checkmated before I know it.

‘Eat your porridge,’ I say. Lame, but it’s all I’ve got.

‘It’s yucky.’

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