Chapter 47: The Transparent Gaze

Chapter 47: The Transparent Gaze

The day of delivery arrived. The hospital in Akureyri welcomed us under a wintry sky, and inside I faced the most brutal physical test of my entire existence. Never, not even in my worst nightmares, have I felt so much pain in my life. I felt like my back was being torn apart, that my bones were opening up to make way for life in a superhuman effort that took my breath away. Ethan was by my side every second, his big hand supporting me, sweating with me, whispering words of encouragement in his native language, holding my exhausted body.

But then, the pain suddenly stopped. The roar of the internal storm died down in a second as the doctors, one by one, placed my three children on my bare chest.

At that very moment, all suffering disappeared. The agony of contractions faded, the weariness of labor hours was erased, and any remnants of the fifteen years of my bitter past evaporated. Everything was buried under the blessed weight of their small warm bodies that sought my warmth.

Eatha, Finn, and Aodh calmed down when they heard my heartbeat, that same boom, boom that Ethan had learned to listen to months ago. The three of them opened their small eyelids at the same time and looked at us. I gasped: all three were born with Ethan's eyes. A transparent, clean gaze, blue as the northern sky that had given us the refuge. Seeing the purity of his eyes fixed on mine was the most beautiful, the most sacred and the fullest thing I have experienced in my entire existence. My children were here. The writer who had arrived broken at the edge of the world had finally finished writing the happiest chapter of her life.