Chapter 9 - The Weight of Glass
The neonatal intensive care unit was a silent world of blue phototherapy light and the rhythmic, musical chiming of monitors that sounded like digital wind chimes.
He was four pounds, six ounces.
He lay inside an acrylic box that looked like a miniature greenhouse, his skin translucent as tracing paper, his ribs rising and falling with a rapid, shallow flutter beneath two white sensor pads no larger than postage stamps. On his head was a knitted blue cap that was far too large, sliding down over ears that were perfectly shaped, tiny curls of dark hair peeking out from beneath the yarn.
Grant stood with his hands pressed against the warm plastic of the incubator.
He had scrubbed his skin with iodine soap until his hands were raw, had put on a yellow paper gown that tore at the armpits, and had walked into the room as if he were entering an ancient cathedral whose roof had been blown off by an artillery shell.
"He was five weeks early," the nurse said softly from behind him. "His lungs are slightly immature, but he’s breathing room air with forty percent assistance. He’s a fighter, Mr. Hale. He has your jaw."
Grant didn't speak. He couldn't. If he opened his mouth, he felt the entire structure of his chest would collapse inward, crushing his lungs, his heart, his life into a single point of zero volume.
Through two circular ports in the side of the box, he slipped his hand inside.
The air inside was tropical, humid and eighty-five degrees, smelling faintly of sterile water and new skin. He extended his index finger—the finger that had signed the dissolution of their marriage, the finger that had pointed Richard Vance toward forty different corporate acquisitions.
The baby's hand moved.
It was an uncoordinated, blind search through the humid air. The tiny fingers, no longer than matchsticks, brushed Grant’s knuckle, hesitated, and then closed.
The grip was astonishingly strong.
It was not a reflex. To Grant, in that blue-lit room, it felt like an anchor being thrown from a great height into the dark, catching in the mud of the sea floor and holding an entire ship against the storm.
"Arthur," Grant whispered, his tears finally breaking, falling onto the paper gown with soft, dark impacts. "His name is Arthur."
After his father. The man who had worked thirty years in the radiator factory with three fingers missing from his left hand, who had never seen an eight-hundred-million-dollar balance sheet, but who had never once left his family’s table while there was bread on the board.
"Mr. Hale?"
He turned.
Emily was being wheeled into the room by an orderly. She was propped up on three pillows, an IV pole trailing beside her with two bags of saline and plasma. Her face was pale, almost translucent in the blue light, but her eyes were open.
She looked at the incubator. Then she looked at Grant’s finger, still locked in the baby’s fist.
The orderly stopped the chair beside the box and quietly stepped back, disappearing into the corridor.
"He's very small," she whispered, her voice like paper rubbing together.
"He's strong," Grant said, not moving his hand, afraid that even the breath from his nostrils might break the contact. "The doctor said his heart is clear. His lungs are expanding."
Emily looked at him. Her gaze moved over his ruined suit, the salt stains on his shoes, the red, swollen rims of his eyes where the tears had carved clean channels through the dust on his cheeks.
"Vanessa called me," she said.
Grant’s hand stiffened slightly, though he kept his finger still within Arthur’s grip. "When?"
"Three hours ago. While they were prepping me." Emily’s head rested back against the pillow. "She told me you had killed the merger. She said you were going to be removed from the firm on Monday. She said you had lost your mind."
"I haven't lost it," Grant said, his voice steady now, clear and quiet. "I just stopped using their ledger."
"You don't have to do this, Grant. You don't have to destroy your life to pay for mine."
"My life was already destroyed, Emily," he said, turning his head to meet her hazel eyes. "It was destroyed the day I let Richard Vance tell me that my wife was a line item that could be settled with an indemnity clause. I just didn't notice the rubble because the ceiling was so high."
She looked away, toward the small form in the incubator. Her hand, trembling with the aftershocks of the surgery, reached out and touched the glass near the baby’s head.
"I can't go back to what we were," she said.
"I know."
"I don't trust you," she whispered. "I don't trust the way you think. I don't trust the things you value. Every time you look at a problem, you look for the lever that moves the money."
"Then teach me how to look at something else," he said.
"It takes years, Grant. Some people never learn."
"I have time," he said. "The board meets tomorrow to vote on my removal. By noon, I won't have a company. I won't have an office. I’ll have some cash in a blind trust and a lot of people who won't take my calls."
May you like
Emily looked back at him, a faint, exhausted shadow of a smile touching the corner of her mouth—the first real smile he had seen on her face in seven hundred days.
"Good," she murmured. "You always were terrible on the phone."
