Page 97 of Beloved Beauty

She has a full head of black hair, wild and soft and beautiful.

Kye stands and eases Vivian into Krishna’s arms with the quiet adoration of someone who hasn’t stopped falling in love since the moment he first saw her.

Krishna looks at me. “Wanna hold her?”

Panic flutters in my chest. “Oh. Um—I don’t want to wake her. She looks so peaceful.”

Krishna laughs. “She sleeps through her dad playing guitar, my sister vacuuming, and the neighbor’s dog barking at every moving leaf. Trust me, you won’t wake her.”

I hesitate, but my feet carry me forward.

Krishna places her in my arms. And something shifts in an instant.

She fits. Not in a literal way but in a soul-deep, this-means-something way. And I forget how to breathe because this is something I never expected.

Not now. Not yet. But a blooming begins, and it grows deeper and wider with every second I hold her.

I glide my thumb across her temple. “She’s perfect,” I whisper.

Krishna sits beside me, watching with that knowing smile only women who’ve crossed through the veil of motherhood seem to wear. “She’s identical to Kye, which is so unfair. I’m the one who was miserable. She could’ve at least come out looking a little like me.”

I glance up, smiling. “What about her lips?”

We both laugh and simultaneously say, “No.”

We sit in that hush for a while, the only sounds the soft whoosh of a white noise machine and the delicate breaths of a baby who doesn’t know her very existence is undoing me.

And it could be that’s what motherhood does.

Perhaps it unravels you in the quietest, most unexpected places—only to knit you back together into something stronger. Something softer. Something new.

I brush my thumb along the ridge of her tiny nose and wonder what it would be like to have one of our own.

But what do I know about being a mother?

Robin was chaos in lipstick and cheap perfume—fickle and beautiful and forever chasing a man or a feeling or both. Charlene was harder.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m stitched with too much of them.

I swallow hard and glance down at Vivian again. Her lashes flutter but don’t open. She sleeps like she trusts the world. I never had that kind of sleep as a kid. But my children will if I’m careful and do things differently from Robin and Charlene.

It hits me like a quiet hurricane––I want this.

It terrifies me, but it also makes something ache in my chest in a way I didn’t know was possible until now.

I press a soft kiss to Vivian’s hair and close my eyes for a moment, breathing her in.

Maybe this restlessness will fade after I leave and I become preoccupied by other things.

Or maybe a seed has been planted and is already growing roots.

I hand Vivian back to Krishna, my arms reluctant to let go. The baby stirs but doesn’t wake—her tiny face nestled against her mother’s chest as if she knows she’s home.

I smooth a hand over her soft hair one last time. “Bye, beautiful girl.”

Krishna beams, her eyes flicking between me and Vivian before settling on me. “You looked natural with her,” she says, her voice light but laced with meaning.

I laugh under my breath, trying to make it breezy. “That’s just because she didn’t cry.”

---