Julian was looking at her.
He had been looking at her since the nurse walked in. Standing slightly to the side, still holding the boy against his chest, watching Amara's face with the quiet attentiveness of a man who had learned how to read her in the spaces between what she said.
He saw it all.
Every bit of it. The tears she wasn't wiping. The way her arms had stayed in the position of holding even after the baby was gone from them, curved and empty and not quite ready to give up the shape.
The way she was looking at the nurse with an expression that had stopped being about the nurse several thoughts ago.
He understood what she was doing to herself.
He could see the architecture of it, the result, the name Seb had said, the prayer she had been carrying for months, all of it converging in this moment on the simple fact of a baby who had not fed from her mother and was feeding now from a bottle, and Amara turning all of it into evidence of something it was not evidence of.
