Chapter 246: 246. Drool

Arthur Miller—sixty-seven years old, thirty-eight years out of IATSE Local 44, and no relation whatsoever to the kid whose name was plastered across the marquee outside—sat in Row H of the Burbank AMC with his arms folded across his flannel chest and his boots planted flat on the sticky concrete floor.

The tip of his left ring finger was missing down to the first knuckle, donated to a ten-inch Rockwell table saw on Stage 9 at Warner Bros. back in the summer of eighty-eight. Whenever the air conditioning in a theater ran too cold, the stump throbbed like a bad tooth.

Beside him, his daughter Beth was taking off her wool scarf and folding it neatly over her purse. She was thirty-two, had her mother's narrow chin, and had a permanent purplish callus under the left side of her jaw from holding a Guarneri copy violin five hours a day on the scoring stages over in Culver City and Fox.

"Stop scowling at the curtain, Dad," Beth said, nudging his elbow with hers. "You haven't even seen a frame yet and you already look like you want to ask for the manager."

"I'm not scowling," Arthur grunted, shifting his hips in the padded seat. "I'm sitting. This is how my face looks when I sit. And nine-fifty for a small popcorn is highway robbery. It's corn and salt. Costs twelve cents a bushel in Iowa."

"I bought the popcorn," Beth reminded him, holding the cardboard tub toward him. "Eat some before the trailers finish."

Arthur took a small handful, chewing deliberately. He hadn't been inside a commercial movie theater since Master and Commander came out. There wasn't much point anymore. For a guy who had spent his whole adult life reading architectural blueprints, ripping quarter-sawn white oak, and turning stair balusters on a lathe, modern movies looked like watching somebody play a video game through a dirty aquarium. Everything floated. Actors stood in front of thirty-foot green cloths in Atlanta warehouses while kids in Vancouver painted fake castles behind them with computer mice. Nobody built walls with two-by-fours and horsehair plaster anymore.

And out of all the stories in the world Beth could have dragged him out of the house to see on a Tuesday afternoon in January, it had to be Beauty and the Beast.

Arthur still had a sour taste in his mouth from 2004.

Back in the spring of 2004, when Disney finally got around to making their animated 2D feature version of the fairy tale, Arthur had been the lead shop foreman at an independent scenic mill in Sun Valley. Disney's marketing department had contracted his twelve-man crew to build three massive, fourteen-foot scale physical cutaway models of the beast's castle for the premiere at the El Capitan and the travelling museum tour.

Arthur and his boys had spent nine weeks on those miniatures. They hand-carved over four thousand individual limestone blocks out of high-density basswood, turned miniature spiral staircases out of walnut, and wired three hundred tiny grain-of-wheat incandescent bulbs into brass chandeliers no bigger than thimbles.

Then the movie actually came out in July of 2004.

It was an unmitigated trainwreck. Disney's upper management had gutted the animation budget halfway through production, shipped the ink-and-paint work to a cut-rate digital house overseas, and replaced the orchestral score with five terrible synth-pop radio tracks sung by teen idols who couldn't hold pitch. The Beast looked like a flat brown bear drawn with a thick Magic Marker. The movie made twelve million bucks on opening weekend against an eighty-million-dollar spend, got laughed out of every newspaper in America, and triggered a vicious four-way lawsuit with the European literary estate that ended with a French judge stripping Disney of the underlying trademarks entirely.

On the Monday after opening weekend in 2004, a twenty-six-year-old junior marketing vice president in a Banana Republic suit had driven out to Arthur's shop in Sun Valley with two security guards. Because Disney didn't want to pay the monthly climate-storage fees on a flop, the kid stood there with a clipboard and watched Arthur's apprentices take five-pound sledgehammers to nine weeks of hand-carved walnut and basswood until it all fit into a thirty-yard roll-off dumpster.

Arthur had put in his union retirement papers eighteen months later.

"Lights are going down," Beth whispered, resting her hand on his flannel sleeve. "Just watch the carpentry, okay? If it's fake, I'll buy you a patty melt at Bob's Big Boy on the way home and let you complain for an hour."

"Deal," Arthur muttered.

The house lights faded to black.

The projector beam cut through the dust above their heads, throwing the opening frames onto the sixty-foot canvas.

There was no glossy castle logo. Just the sound of winter wind tearing through heavy timber, followed by the first interior shots of the fortress before the curse.

Within four minutes, Arthur stopped chewing his popcorn.

His left hand—the one with the missing knuckle—slowly came down onto the padded armrest and gripped the plastic edge.

On screen, the camera tracked down a forty-foot stone hallway as servants hurried to bolt the tall oak shutters against the sleet.

Arthur leaned forward two inches, squinting through the bottom half of his bifocals.

Wait a second, he thought.

When the footman slammed the heavy ten-foot oak shutter against the stone casement, the wood didn't stop with that weightless, digital thump that happens when a prop is made of painted Styrofoam and given a sound effect in post-production. The shutter bounced a sixteenth of an inch off the iron latch, the heavy forged strap-hinges visibly straining against the mortar, and a tiny puff of real lime dust shook loose from the upper lintel and drifted down through the candlelight.

"Look at the mortise joints on that doorframe," Arthur muttered under his breath, barely audible over the wind in the speakers.

"Shh," Beth whispered, though she was smiling in the dark.

The film moved into the village square, and then into the tavern.

Arthur's jaw actually went slack.

He knew what soundstage timber looked like. He knew every trick in the book for faking old European wood with polyurethane foam molds and brown glaze.

That wasn't foam on the screen.

When Hugh Jackman jumped onto the center table in the tavern and brought his heavy leather boot down on the plank, the two-inch-thick white oak board bowed under his two hundred pounds and sprang back. The overhead rafters were real hand-adzed Douglas fir timbers, ten inches square, joined with stout oak pegs that stood proud of the wood by half an inch. You could see the saw marks from a band mill along the underside of the gallery joists. You could see the real woodsmoke from the hearth curling around the iron nail-heads, staining the lime plaster yellow where the chimney drew poorly.

Somebody had actually built a three-story French tavern inside a hangar. With real wood. With real load-bearing joinery.

Beside him, Beth wasn't looking at the wood. Her head was tilted slightly to the left, her eyes half-closed the way she always looked when she was listening to a playback in the control booth at Sony.

During Anne Hathaway's quiet song along the stone wall outside the village, Beth's fingers tapped silently against her knee, tracking the tempo.

There was no click-track.

For the last ten years, every movie musical Beth had been hired to play on had been recorded to a rigid, quantized digital metronome. The actors sang in an isolated, dead-air carpet booth three months before filming, an engineer dragged every single vowel onto a perfect mathematical grid with pitch-correction software until they sounded like high-end synthesizers, and then the actors went on set and moved their mouths while pretending to breathe.

On screen, Anne Hathaway hoisted a heavy canvas sack of flour onto her hip while walking up a steep cobblestone grade. As she sang the final phrase of the verse, her breath actually hitched from the physical incline. Her pitch went flat by maybe four cents as her diaphragm took the weight of the sack, her throat visibly working in the cold air, and the orchestra behind her—forty real strings that sounded like they had been recorded in a massive, high-ceilinged room with wood paneling—slowed down a fraction of a beat to follow *her*, breathing right alongside her footsteps.

"They recorded it live on the floor," Beth whispered, her eyes wide as she turned to look at her father. "Dad, that's a live boom mic hidden in the wardrobe. There's zero pitch correction on her voice. That's real air."

And then the movie moved into the ruined West Wing, and later into the grand ballroom.

When the twenty-four chandeliers came up over the parquet floor, Arthur didn't move a muscle.

He knew how long it took to lay herringbone white oak parquet by hand. He knew how much twenty-four lead-crystal fixtures weighed hanging from a soundstage grid—you had to reinforce the ceiling trusses with schedule-forty steel pipe and chain motors just to keep the roof from sagging. And as the camera swept around Dan Stevens and Anne Hathaway in the center of the floor, the light wasn't a flat yellow wash. Every time her yellow silk skirt spun past a column, thousands of tiny, sharp prism rainbows from the real cut crystal swept across the waxed wood, reflecting up into the gold leaf on the ceiling coffer.

When the credits finally rolled two hours later, Arthur stayed in his seat until the white text for the construction crew scrolled up the center of the black screen.

Construction Coordinator ...... T. McAllister

Lead Mill Foreman ............ R. Gable

Head Scenic Painter .......... M. Rossi

Arthur knew Bobby Gable. Bobby had apprenticed under him at Warner Bros. in ninety-four before the shops closed down.

Arthur stood up slowly, pulling his brown canvas jacket zipped up to his chin, and walked out through the lobby doors with Beth into the bright, cool Burbank afternoon.

They walked across the parking structure concrete to Arthur's blue ninety-seven Ford F-150. Arthur unlocked the passenger door for his daughter with the metal key, walked around the hood, climbed in behind the wheel, and sat there for a moment without putting the key in the ignition.

He took off his bifocals, pulled a clean white cotton handkerchief from his back pocket, and wiped the corners of his eyes carefully before blowing his nose once.

"Dad?" Beth asked softly from the passenger seat.

Arthur folded the handkerchief into a neat square, tucked it back into his pocket, and put his glasses back on. He looked out through the windshield at the San Fernando hills across the freeway.

"Bobby Gable built that staircase," Arthur said, his voice rough and slightly thick. "I recognized the way he miters the bottom bullnose step. Taught him how to bend laminated oak riser strips in a steam box twenty years ago."

He tapped his four fingers—and the short stump of the fifth—against the worn leather steering wheel.

"If they were still building sets like that," Arthur said quietly, "I never would've put my tools in the garage, Bethie."

Beth reached across the bench seat and rested her hand over his wrist. "I know, Dad."

Arthur cleared his throat, started the truck with a heavy roar of the V8, and backed out of the stall. "Come on. I'll buy you that patty melt. And don't tell your mother I liked a musical or I'll never hear the end of it."

---

Three miles down Olive Avenue, in the basement screening room of the Miller Studios administration building, it was ten o'clock on Wednesday morning—which meant it was five in the morning on Thursday down in Wellington, New Zealand.

On the eighty-foot theater screen, split into two high-definition encrypted satellite feeds alongside a live Avid timeline window, sat Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro.

They were calling from Edit Bay 1 at Stone Street Studios in Miramar. The room behind them looked like a cross between an antique military bunker and a Victorian curiosity shop. Pinned to the fabric walls behind their heads were hundreds of charcoal creature sketches, topographical maps of the South Island marked with colored pushpins, and three foam-latex orc heads impaled on wooden broomsticks.

Peter was barefoot, wearing a rumpled green polo shirt and shorts despite the early morning Wellington fog, nursing a massive porcelain mug of builder's tea.

Sitting right beside him, wearing a black crewneck sweater with his round wire-rimmed glasses perched on his nose and a thick leather-bound notebook open in his lap, was Guillermo.

In the Burbank leather seats, Daniel sat with a legal pad on his knee, Tom to his left with an unlit cigar, and Benny down at the control console with his hands resting on the transport deck.

"Alright, Benny, roll Reel 3 of the Fellowship cut from the Bree gate," Peter said through the studio speakers, taking a slurp of his tea. "Jabez dropped the final rain foley and Howard's rough temp brass in two hours ago."

"Rolling here," Benny said, hitting the master link key.

The satellite portrait minimized to the bottom corner, and the main screen filled with the assembly cut of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

Daniel leaned forward, resting his chin in his hand.

When he had greenlit all three films to be shot simultaneously under one massive, unbroken production banner, the conventional wisdom in Hollywood had been that a single director would literally die of exhaustion by month six. Even with a full year of pre-production and the permanent construction of Hobbiton on the Alexander Farm in Matamata, shooting three three-hour epics back-to-back was a logistical monster.

Bringing Guillermo in to co-direct alongside Peter had turned a grueling marathon into a blitzkrieg.

The two of them operated like two halves of the same brain. While Peter took Unit A out into the sweeping valleys of the South Island and the pastures of the Alexander Farm to shoot the vast cavalry movements, the emotional heart of the Shire, and the fellowship's trek across the mountains, Guillermo took Unit B into the massive subterranean sets in Wellington—handling the suffocating, labyrinthine darkness of the Mines of Moria, the clockwork brutality of Isengard's forges, the Dead Marshes, and the ancient, wet horror of Shelob's lair.

On the screen, the scene inside the common room of the Prancing Pony played out in warm, smoky, claustrophobic candlelight.

Daniel Radcliffe (Frodo) and Nick Frost (Sam) sat huddled at a rough wooden booth, soaked to the bone from the mud outside, looking genuinely small and out of their depth among the six-foot-four local forestry workers cast as the men of Bree.

And in the far, shadowed corner beneath a low oak beam sat Mads Mikkelsen.

Casting Mads as Aragorn had been Daniel's first non-negotiable note when they put the books on the table. He hadn't wanted a clean-shaven thirty-year-old matinee idol who looked like he spent two hours in a hair trailer every morning.

On screen, Mads didn't say a word for ninety seconds. He sat in the dark with a long-stemmed clay pipe burning low between his scarred fingers, a heavy, grease-stained bison-hide duster pulled over tarnished chainmail, mud caked up to the knees of his riding boots. With those razor-sharp Danish cheekbones hollow in the ember light and one pale, unblinking eye watching the door from beneath a wet hood, he looked like a man who had spent forty winters sleeping in frozen ditches and eating raw venison to keep the dark things out of the north.

When Mads finally stood up and hauled Radcliffe into the back room by his coat collar—moving with the sudden, silent economy of a wolf—the physical contrast between them did all the storytelling before a single line of dialogue was spoken.

The reel jumped ahead to the snowy ridge of Caradhras, and then to the forests of Amon Hen.

Here, Sean Bean's Boromir took over the center of the frame.

Standing in real waist-deep snow on the Remarkables mountain range with the freezing wind blowing his heavy fur cloak sideways, Bean held the little golden ring on its chain between two gloved fingers. There was no scenery-chewing villainy in his face—just the heavy, desperate exhaustion of a general watching his country bleed to death a thousand miles away, trying to convince himself that this tiny piece of metal could save his father's city.

"Now watch this transition into Moria, Dan," Guillermo's warm, gravelly Mexican accent boomed enthusiastically through the speakers as the reel shifted to Reel 6. "We did not use the digital crowd multiplication for the Chamber of Mazarbul. Look at the goblins on the pillars!"

On screen, the camera tilted up into the gloom of Balin's tomb.

Instead of uniform computer-generated clones scrambling down the stone, Guillermo and Richard Taylor's Weta Workshop crew had recruited forty professional contortionists, rock climbers, and circus acrobats from across Europe and New Zealand, putting them in ultra-thin, sweat-slicked silicone prosthetic skins with elongated, articulated fiberglass finger extensions and sunken, pale eyes.

Suspended on black piano wire rigs mounted to rotational gimbals along the thirty-foot columns, the performers crawled head-first down the vertical stone with a jerky, spider-like, physically real weight that made the hair on the back of Tom's neck stand straight up. When the cave troll burst through the oak doors—a fourteen-foot practical animatronic upper torso operated by four puppeteers on a hydraulic crane, blended seamlessly at the waist with digital legs—the real stone dust and splintered timber hit Sean Bean and Mads Mikkelsen full in the chest.

"Jesus Christ, Guillermo," Tom muttered from his seat, taking the cigar out of his mouth. "Kids are going to have nightmares about those things crawling down the walls until they're forty."

"Good!" Guillermo laughed uproariously on the monitor, clapping his hands together once. "Fairy tales and myth must have teeth, Tom! If the monster in the dark does not look like it smells of wet cave fungus and old teeth, then when Samwise hits it with a frying pan, the frying pan does not matter! You must believe the iron hits real meat!"

Benny paused the playback as the reel ended on the Bridge of Khazad-dûm.

"Benny," Daniel said, turning in his seat toward the console. "How close are we on the full assembly for Fellowship?"

"Jabez and I have Reels 1 through 8 locked within four minutes of final runtime," Benny said, glancing down at his master production chart. "The Shire sequences from the Alexander Farm haven't needed a single frame trimmed since November—the pacing on the farm is dead-on. Once Weta delivers the final fire passes on the Balrog next month, the first movie is ninety percent edited. We could put it in theaters in June if we wanted to."

"We hold for Christmas," Daniel said, looking back up at the satellite screen. "Pete, Guillermo—what's the schedule looking like on the stages down there? The line producer's report said you guys already cleared the Two Towers night shoots."

Peter grinned, rubbing his beard with one hand. "Cleared Helm's Deep ten days ahead of the rain contingency, Dan. Having Guillermo run the subterranean and night units while I had the first unit down in the Mackenzie Basin saved us nine weeks of company moves. Right now, Guillermo is on Stage 4 shooting the first half of the third film—the Minas Tirith courtyard and the Steward's throne room with John Noble."

"And Peter is taking the second unit and two hundred horses back to Twizel on Monday to finish the Pelennor Fields cavalry charges for Return of the King," Guillermo added, holding up his thick leather notebook to show a two-page spread of hand-drawn siege towers and armored Mumakil harnesses. "Everything is pre-lit, everything is boarded to the frame. At this rate, Daniel, we will wrap principal photography on all three films by the second week of April."

Tom slowly lowered his legal pad to his lap, staring up at the two directors on the screen.

"Wait," Tom said. "You're telling me you're going to have all three Lord of the Rings movies completely shot and in the can by April? Eight months before the first one even hits a theater?"

"Every single frame, mate," Peter said cheerfully, lifting his tea mug in a toast. "Which means we have two full years to polish the visual effects and score on the second and third films without rushing a single shot, and the actors don't have to come back for reshoots in wigs three years from now when they look older."

"And your farm in Matamata is already growing its second crop of pumpkins over the Hobbit holes," Guillermo smiled. "The local sheep farmers asked if we could leave the dragon firework tent up by the party tree for the town picnic next month."

"Tell them to keep the tent," Daniel smiled. "And keep the pace steady, guys. Don't burn the stunt team out on the cavalry runs next week. If you need an extra three days for the horses in Twizel, take them."

"Will do, Dan," Peter said, his voice softening slightly as he glanced at the clock on his wall. "And hey—good luck over the next few weeks at home. Fran and I sent a box of merino wool baby blankets up on the courier flight yesterday. You're going to need them."

"And I put a very small, completely harmless plush goblin in the bottom of the box for the little ones," Guillermo added with a completely straight face. "Children should familiarize themselves with classical monster anatomy early, Daniel. It builds their imagination."

"If Florence sees a goblin in the crib at three in the morning, Guillermo, she'll fly to Wellington and hit you with a frying pan herself," Daniel chuckled. "Get some sleep, both of you."

---

February arrived in Los Angeles with three weeks of heavy coastal rain that turned the canyon slopes behind Bel Air a brilliant, violent emerald green, and by the second day of March, the storm clouds had cleared out, leaving the sky washed clean and sharp.

Inside the Miller household, the long nine-month countdown was officially over.

They hadn't staggered into the finish line; they had crashed through it in a twelve-day sprint.

Margot had gone first on the eighteenth of February, right on her due date.

True to form, Margot had handled labor the exact same way she handled fourteen-hour night shoots in freezing rain: with quiet, terrifyingly stubborn Australian grit. Her water hadn't broken in the kitchen; contractions had simply started at two in the morning while they were asleep, spaced cleanly at seven minutes apart. She hadn't woken Florence or Scarlett. She had just tapped Daniel on the shoulder in the dark, calmly brushed her teeth, braided her hair into two neat pigtails so it wouldn't stick to her neck, and walked out to the SUV under her own power.

Eight hours later, in the same third-floor suite at Cedars-Sinai with Dr. Rosenkrantz, Margot had bitten down hard on a rolled linen hand towel, gripped Daniel's left forearm until his skin turned purple, and pushed her daughter into the world at ten-fifteen in the morning without letting out a single scream—just a low, fierce, triumphant breath as the baby girl hit her chest and started wailing at the sunlight coming through the blinds.

Twelve days later, on the first of March, it was Florence's turn.

Florence did not do quiet grit.

Florence's water had broken at four in the afternoon in the middle of the living room while she was standing in front of the television yelling at a contestant on The Great British Bake Off for over-whipping a meringue.

From the moment they cleared the subterranean intake bay at Cedars-Sinai until eleven-forty that night, Florence had waged an loud, deeply personal, uninterrupted six-hour war against the concept of human biology. She had cursed out the fetal monitor in a thick Oxford accent; she had informed Dr. Rosenkrantz that the hospital's adjustable mattress was engineered by sadists; and during the final twenty minutes of transition, she had grabbed Daniel by the front of his flannel shirt, pulled his face two inches from hers, and threatened to trade him for a sourdough starter if he told her to "breathe into her heels" one more time.

And then, the exact second Annika lifted the slick, furious, screaming little girl onto Florence's chest, every ounce of bluster vanished from the room.

Florence had gone dead silent, her lower lip trembling like a child's, burying her nose into the baby's wet dark-blonde hair while tears poured down her flushed cheeks onto the hospital sheets, whispering "Oh, hello... oh, look at you, my little bean, I didn't mean any of the swearing, I promise" over and over until Daniel had to wipe her face with a warm cloth so she could see.

---

Now, it was four o'clock in the afternoon on the fourth of March.

The black studio SUV rolled up the cobblestone motor court of the Bel Air house and eased to a stop in front of the wide stone steps, Joe letting the brakes off slowly so the chassis wouldn't rock.

Daniel stepped out of the back seat into the cool afternoon sun.

He was wearing a faded olive-green field jacket, dark jeans, and boots that hadn't been polished since Christmas. He looked like he had slept about eleven hours total since Valentine's Day—there were dark, permanent-looking crescents under his eyes and four days of thick dark stubble across his jaw—but he moved with a steady, grounded stillness.

He reached back into the floorboard of the truck, unlatched the base of the rear-facing infant carrier with one hand, and lifted it out by the aluminum carry bar.

With his other hand, he reached in to take Florence's elbow as she eased herself down off the running board in her fleece slippers and an oversized cream cable-knit sweater.

"Easy on the step, Flo," Daniel said quietly, taking her weight against his hip as her feet hit the cobblestones. "Don't rush the stitches."

"I'm fine, Miller, stop treating me like antique porcelain," Florence muttered, though she leaned heavily against his side as they walked up the three wide flagstone steps, her eyes never leaving the canvas canopy of the car seat swinging gently in Daniel's right hand. "Is the blanket over her toes? The wind off the canyon feels chilly."

"She's wearing a wool sleeper, knit booties, and two layers of flannel, Flo. She's warmer than we are."

Before Daniel could reach for the brass handle of the front door, the heavy oak panel swung open from the inside.

Scarlett stood in the foyer.

Two and a half months postpartum, she was in worn blue jeans, a tucked-in black cotton t-shirt, and barefoot on the oak floor, her dark red hair pulled up in a high ponytail. Slung across her chest in a soft gray linen wrap carrier was Asher.

At ten weeks old, Asher was no longer the tiny, wrinkled red peanut from December. He had packed on four solid pounds of milk fat, with thick, chubby rolls at his wrists, a shock of dark hair that stood straight up on the crown of his head despite Scarlett's best efforts with baby oil, and wide, alert gray-blue eyes. He had one fist shoved entirely into his mouth, drooling happily onto the top of Scarlett's collarbone while watching the front door.

"Welcome home, mama," Scarlett said softly, stepping back to let them in before reaching out to wrap one arm carefully around Florence's shoulders, pressing a warm kiss to her cheek.

"God, Scarlett, I don't know how you walked around two days after this," Florence groaned, leaning her forehead against Scarlett's shoulder for a second before looking down at Asher. "Hello, bruiser. Have you grown another chin since Tuesday? I think you have."

Asher pulled his wet fist out of his mouth, gave Florence a huge, gummy, completely toothless grin, and immediately went back to chewing his knuckles.

Daniel set his leather hospital bag down by the bench and carried the infant seat down the wide hallway into the main living room.

The living room had been completely re-engineered since Christmas.

The heavy mahogany coffee table with the sharp corners was gone, hauled out to the garage by Joe and replaced by a massive, two-inch-thick padded wool floor mat covered in soft linen quilts. Parked in a neat semi-circle near the warmth of the gas hearth were three identical natural beechwood bassinets—the ones Daniel and Florence had nearly lost their minds assembling with the tiny silver Allen wrenches back in the fall.

Sitting in the deep upholstered glider chair beside the middle bassinet was Margot.

Two weeks after her delivery, Margot was wearing a loose, unbuttoned blue striped linen shirt over a nursing tank, her blonde hair falling over her shoulders, looking tired, unhurried, and completely radiant. Cradled across her lap on a curved pillow was her two-week-old daughter.

"Let me see her, Dan," Margot whispered, smiling up at them as Florence slowly lowered herself onto the edge of the low sofa with a long, grateful sigh.

Daniel knelt on the padded floor mat, unbuckled the five-point harness of the carrier with practiced, three-second efficiency, and slid both hands beneath his newest daughter, lifting her out of the plastic shell.

She weighed six pounds and eleven ounces—the smallest of the three by nearly a pound—wrapped in a cream cotton swaddle patterned with tiny green olive leaves.

Daniel stood up and carried her over to the sofa, sitting down right between Florence and Margot's chair, holding the tiny bundle cradled in his forearms so both women could see her face.

In the warm afternoon light coming through the canyon windows, the little girl's nose wrinkled. She let out a tiny, high-pitched squeak that sounded exactly like a kitten, stretched one miniature fist out of the cotton fold, and blinked her dark eyes open.

"Look at those cheeks," Margot breathed, leaning side-ways out of the glider to gently touch one finger to the baby's tiny knuckle. "Flo, she looks just like your baby pictures from Oxford. Same exact little mouth."

"She has Daniel's eyebrows, though," Florence said, leaning her head on Daniel's shoulder, her fingers stroking the soft dark-blonde down on the baby's scalp. "Look at that scowl. She already looks like a grip put a light stand in the wrong place."

"She doesn't scowl, she's thinking," Daniel said quietly, his thumb gently rubbing the side of the baby's warm cheek.

He looked down at the two little girls within arm's reach, and then up at Scarlett walking in with Asher resting against her chest.

The names had been written onto the birth certificates in black fountain pen before they ever left the hospital floor.

In Margot's lap lay Clara Miller.

Daniel and Margot had picked the name back in January while sitting on the stone wall outside the house watching a winter storm clear off the Pacific—Clara, from the old Latin for bright, clear, and radiant, like the sky after three days of rain. At fourteen days old, Clara already lived up to it. She rarely cried unless her bottle was late; she just lay awake for an hour at a time with her mother's brilliant, clear blue eyes wide open, calmly watching the dust motes float through the sunbeams with a quiet, sunny patience that made the nurses at Cedars fall in love with her.

And in Daniel's arms lay Beatrice Miller.

Officially, on the legal paperwork filed with Los Angeles County, it was Beatrice—meaning she who brings joy, or blessed, chosen specifically because it shared the exact same root meaning as Asher.

Unofficially, she had been Bea—or Little Bea—since about twelve minutes after she was born. After Florence had spent thirty-nine weeks referring to her stomach exclusively as "the Bean," there hadn't been a chance in hell of calling her anything else.

And unlike her sister Clara, two-day-old Bea had zero interest in quiet patience.

Right on cue, Bea decided that the room temperature was one degree too cool for her liking. Her tiny face turned the exact color of a ripe tomato, her mouth opened into a square, and she let out a surprisingly loud, raspy, indignant squawk that echoed off the living room beams.

In the carrier on Scarlett's chest, Asher's head snapped around at the sound.

In Margot's lap, Clara blinked once, yawned, and went right back to staring at her own thumb.

Scarlett laughed softly, walking over to sit on the other side of Florence on the couch, unclipping the linen wrap to lift Asher out. "Well. Nobody's ever going to wonder whose daughter she is, Flo. Same lungs."

"She knows what she wants and she communicates it clearly," Florence said proudly, reaching her arms out to Daniel. "Give me the Bean, Dan. She wants her four o'clock snack."

Daniel carefully transferred Bea into Florence's arms, tucking a spare burp cloth under Florence's elbow before stepping over to take two-week-old Clara from Margot so Margot could stretch her legs out onto the floor mat.

"Thanks, love," Margot sighed, rolling her shoulders back as Daniel sat down on the thick wool rug right between the three bassinets, settling Clara into the crook of his left arm while Scarlett laid Asher down on his stomach on the quilt beside Daniel's knee for his afternoon tummy time.

For a few minutes, the only sounds in the living room were the rhythmic, wet noises of Bea nursing under Florence's sweater, the soft tick-tick of the gas hearth, and Asher grunting like a tiny bodybuilder as he pushed himself up on his chubby forearms to stare at Clara's yellow socks.

Daniel sat cross-legged on the floor.

In his left arm, Clara weighed barely seven pounds, warm and smelling of clean baby soap and sweet milk, her tiny fingers curled loosely around the cuff of his flannel shirt.

By his right knee, Asher was kicking his legs against the quilt, letting out happy, bubbling little coos every time Daniel tapped the floor in front of him with his fingertips.

And on the couch right behind him, Florence was whispering some ridiculous story about a duck in London to Bea while Scarlett leaned her head back against the cushions and Margot rested her bare feet against Daniel's hip.

The house was a disaster by architectural magazine standards.

There were four sterilized plastic bottles drying on a rack on the marble kitchen island. There was a stack of thirty folded muslin burp cloths sitting on top of Daniel's two-thousand-dollar stereo receiver. The front hallway had two double-wide strollers parked beside the umbrella stand like armored personnel carriers, and nobody in the room was wearing clothes that didn't have at least one tiny spot of baby spit-up or olive oil on them.

Daniel looked down at Clara's tiny blue eyes looking up at his chin.

He reached over with his right hand, sliding his palm under Asher's chest to help the boy roll over onto his back when his arms got tired, eliciting another huge, gummy, cross-eyed smile from his son.

"Look at you two," Daniel murmured, his voice too low to carry past the edge of the rug.

Above him on the sofa, Scarlett looked down over the edge of the cushion, watching Daniel hold Clara in one arm while tickling Asher's stomach with his other hand.

She nudged Margot's shoulder lightly with her own.

Margot looked down, her blue eyes crinkling at the corners with a quiet, bone-deep warmth, while Florence glanced down over Bea's fuzzy head and smiled without making a single joke.

"Hey, Dan," Scarlett said softly.

Daniel looked up from the floor, one eyebrow raised. "Yeah?"

"You have drool on your collar," she smiled.

Daniel glanced down at the wet patch Asher had left on his shirt earlier, then looked at the three babies within two feet of his knees, and let out a low, quiet laugh that settled right into his chest.

"I have three more shirts in the closet," Daniel said, leaning his back comfortably against the front of the sofa between their knees. "We're good."

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