Audrey was staring at the ceiling. She had her arms around the baby, and her eyes were fixed on a point above her. She hadn’t looked at me since the moment after I said hi, when something crossed her face, and she turned away from it.
Easton was across from me, quiet, doing his own piece of the charting. He glanced at me once. I looked at the monitor.
The adrenaline started coming down somewhere past the bypass exit.
I felt it in my hands first. The fine tremor that showed up after every hard call, the body's way of announcing that the crisis was over, and the shaking could start. I could hear the siren, the road under the tires, the baby making a small sound against Audrey's chest that was not a cry but was close to one. I could hear my own breathing, which was faster than it should have been.
I was in the back of a moving ambulance with a woman I'd not spoken to in months and a baby I'd just delivered on the shoulder of a state highway. The adrenaline had been holding the questions at bay, and now that it was leaving, the questions were coming in behind it.
I looked at Audrey. She was still looking at the ceiling. The baby was against her chest. Her face was closed, shuttered, the wall back up, and I couldn't read what was behind it.
"Where's the father?" I asked.
My voice came out even. Professional. A paramedic asking a relevant question about the patient's support system, nothing more. I was still inside the story I'd been carrying since Main Street—the man she met after me, the relationship that moved fast. Easton glanced up from the chart.
Audrey didn't look at me. "He's not in the picture."
Even. Flat. Rehearsed. A sentence she had said before, to other people, enough times that the edges were smooth.
"I'm sorry," I said and meant it. I was sitting in a jump seat being sorry on behalf of a man I didn't know who had chosen not to be here for this, and the sorry was real, and I sat with it for a beat.
Then the math started.
Nine months. Nine months since the wedding. Nine months since the morning in her apartment when she sat on the edge of the bed in her robe and told me it couldn't be a thing, and I said okay, and we made the pact.
Nine months was a pregnancy.
The thought surfaced and would not go back under. The baby was full-term.
The story I'd been carrying since Main Street—the other man, the relationship I invented to explain what I saw—came apart one piece at a time. There wasnoother man. There never was. The version I built to let me take the bypass, skip the barbecues, and keep the pact intact was a version I'd made up because the truth was too large to carry without asking for it.
The charm reflex reached for a joke. Some version of light, deflected, the grin that had been getting me through rooms since I was seventeen. It left my mouth before I could stop it, and it was wrong the moment it hit the air.
"She's not mine, is she?"
The words landed in the ambulance like something dropped from a height. I heard them come back to me, heard how they sounded, heard the lightness I'd reached for curdle into something that wasn’t light at all.
Audrey said nothing. The monitor beeped. The siren kept going.
"Audrey." Quieter. The charm was gone. "Is she my child?"
Audrey looked at me.
She looked at me for a long time. She looked at me with her whole face open in a way I'd not seen since the morning after the wedding. Her eyes were wet. Her mouth was set.
She closed her eyes. She kept them closed for a few seconds, long enough that I thought she wasn't going to answer at all.
When she opened them, she nodded once.
The siren changed pitch. The ambulance slowed. I heard the tires catch the lip of the driveway, the change in road noise that meant we were off Route 9 and onto hospital concrete. The bay doors of Hartsdale General were ahead of us. I could feel the ambulance turning, easing into the bay.
The engine stopped.
The doors opened at Hartsdale General.
The hospital team came out. Two nurses, an ER resident, and the intake coordinator with the clipboard. The stretcher came out of the ambulance with Audrey on it, the baby on her chest, the thermal blanket tucked around both of them. They moved toward the doors.
I did the handoff because it was my job. I stood at the back of the ambulance and gave the ER nurse the information she needed: patient, twenty-eight, full-term, field delivery on Route 9 at approximately fourteen-thirty-two, mother and baby both stable, baby pink and crying at delivery, Apgar eight at one minute. The nurse took the sheet. The team took the stretcher. The doors slid shut behind them.
