Chapter 6 - HOME STUDY
Discharge day did not look like a movie.
It looked like paperwork, instructions, signatures, medication schedule, feeding plan, follow-up appointments, CPR review, car seat test, and Mason asking the same question three different ways because terror had made him thorough.
Emily handed him a folder.
“Everything is in here.”
“I read it.”
“I know.”
“I’ll read it again.”
“I know.”
Jonah, still legally Baby Boy Ellis, slept in the car seat dressed in a soft gray outfit Mason had bought after asking Emily whether newborn pants were “decorative or functional.”
She had told him both.
Mason had purchased five.
Before leaving, he looked toward the rocking chair.
The place where the crying stopped.
Emily noticed.
“You can come back,” she said. “For volunteer shifts. After adjustment.”
He nodded.
“Feels wrong leaving with him.”
“Why?”
“Because there are others crying.”
Emily’s throat tightened.
“You can’t hold every baby.”
Mason looked down at Jonah.
“No. But I can hold the one they hand me.”
Outside the hospital, a small group waited.
Not reporters.
Not donors.
Mason’s motorcycle club.
Twelve bikers standing beside trucks instead of bikes because Mason had told them motorcycles were “not newborn logistics.”
Duke held a sign that read WELCOME HOME, LITTLE MAN.
The letters were crooked.
The love was not.
Mason stopped.
“You idiots.”
Duke wiped his eyes.
“Your idiot village.”
Emily stood at the doors and watched Mason place Jonah carefully into the back seat of a pickup fitted with a new infant car seat inspected twice by hospital staff and once by Mason himself.
No leather vest.
No engine roar.
No performance.
Just a man driving twenty miles under the speed limit with a newborn who had finally stopped crying.
The first night was hard.
Mason later admitted that.
Jonah woke every ninety minutes.
The feeding schedule was exhausting.
The monitor instructions scared him.
At 3:00 a.m., convinced the baby was breathing “too quietly,” Mason called the nurse line.
At 4:10, he called again.
At 5:00, he sent a message through the approved foster portal asking whether newborn sneezes had “categories.”
Grace responded at 7:15.
Mr. Reeves, please drink coffee. Sneezes do not currently require classification.
He printed the message and taped it to the fridge.
Weeks passed.
Jonah gained weight.
His cheeks filled.
His cry strengthened, then softened.
Mason learned the difference between hungry, tired, gassy, and offended.
Duke learned to wash bottles.
Another biker, Tank, learned lullabies and denied it violently.
Emily visited once as part of a volunteer follow-up group with Grace.
Mason’s house smelled like clean laundry and formula.
The nursery was pale green.
On the rocking chair lay the gray cloth from Sarah’s blanket, now folded beside Jonah’s.
Grace checked the supplies.
Emily watched Mason hold Jonah.
He looked less afraid now.
Not less careful.
Just less shocked that love had trusted him.
On the wall above the crib, Mason had hung no motorcycles, no skulls, no slogans.
Only three framed words.
STAY.
SOFT.
STEADY.
Emily read them.
May you like
Mason shrugged.
“Rules for me.”
