Basten sat in the kitchen, just outside the bedroom, and listened to the sounds emanating from within. There was a bustle of people moving about and low voices murmuring things which he could not decipher. Every few minutes, he heard the voice of Jessa moaning or crying out briefly as she was experiencing labor pains. The one place Basten most desired to be, he was not permitted.

A knock at the door drew his attention as he rose to answer it, revealing his parents standing in the light thrown from the doorway. He moved aside to admit them and his mother instantly went to the bedroom door and entered while his father stood beside him awkwardly. “Well,” began his father before stopping and not finishing whatever thought had come into his head.

“Good evening Walter,” came a voice from the chair near the hearth as Jessa’s father leaned out and greeted Basten’s father.

“Henn’d,” Walter replied, nodding to him. Their animosity toward one another had not tempered over the years, but they knew not to display it now, during this joyous time. Basten resumed his former seat next to the bedroom door and was joined by Walter. “Don’t worry,” he said softly, “everything is going to be fine.”

As if in cue, Jessa’s cries began to crescendo and became drawn out for longer than before. “Soon enough,” Henn’d said from the fire.

“Your child is going to be amazing,” Walter explained, “but in ways you cannot even begin to imagine.”

“I’m just so scared I will lose her,” Basten said. “I have never heard her in such pain and distress.”

“It is normal, and it will pass. You’ll see.”

Jessa suddenly screamed out in agony and Basten, disregarding his banishment from his own bedroom, flew to the door and inside. He was confronted by a scene of organized chaos as Jessa was lying in her back and the nurse, who had graciously come when Basten pounded on her door in the middle of the night, was holding a writhing, shrieking little girl. Still covered in blood and discharge, Basten cared little; he approached the nurse and held out his hands. The tiny infant placed in his arms weighed almost nothing, but she was his. He moved to Jessa’s side and placed the child on her breast.

He wept. Tears streamed down his face to match the ones that were in that of his wife’s. Surrounded by women, he still took no shame in his tears, but let them flow as he lay next to Jessa and held her and his child.

Nothing else existed in that moment except his new family and their happiness.