What I can tell you is that by week four, the baby had a name written on a small card taped to his incubator. Not a legal name, not yet, but a name the nurses had started using among themselves.
Bear.
Wade hadn’t suggested it. He’d never called him that in front of us, only in that first whispered minute. But somehow the name had moved through the room on its own, the way things do in a unit where everyone is watching everyone else closer than they let on.
He went home eventually. Healthy enough. The paperwork took longer than the medicine.
Wade still volunteers. He’s been doing it for two years now. He has a regular Thursday slot and a backup Wednesday if someone cancels. He holds babies that nobody visits. He sits in that chair for hours at a time and he talks to them in that low rumble about bears and mountains and rivers.
He never makes it about himself.
But on his left wrist, every time his sleeve rides up, there’s Cody.
Five letters and a date.
And I think that’s why his hands are so careful.
