She squeezed my shoulder on her way out. The door clicked shut behind her.
I looked at the clipboard. The hospital's birth certificate worksheet. Official letterhead, state seal in the upper left corner, boxes with their labels, and a pen attached by a beaded chain. I'd handed this form to a thousand women. I set the clipboard on my lap and uncapped the pen.
Baby's name: Nova. Last name. The pen stopped. Callahan. I wrote it. Date and time of birth. Place of birth: Hartsdale, New York. Mother's full legal name: Audrey Eileen Callahan. Mother's date of birth. Mother's residence. I filled the fields neatly and fast.
Then the father's section.
Father's full legal name. Father's date of birth. Father's residence.
Three empty boxes. I looked at them.
I thought about Duke in this room yesterday, sayingmy childin a voice I'd never heard from him. I thought about nine months of carrying this alone, nine months of building the version of this story where there was one name on the paper, and it was mine.
I thought about my mother. Not the woman who left this room twenty minutes ago. The younger one. She put his name on a marriage certificate. She believed in that piece of paper with everything she had, and the man on the other side of it walked away, and the paper didn't stop him. It never held.
I wasn’t going to give Duke Rhodes a legal claim to my daughter's life and then spend years hoping he'd honor it. Hope was my mother's drug. It kept her at the kitchen table for three years, setting a place for a man who was never coming back. I saw what hope did, and I learned.
I believed Duke wanted this. I believed he meant it yesterday when he stood at the foot of my bed and saidmy childlike the words cost him something. But I'd worked this floor for six years, and I knew what wanting looked like on the first day. I'd seen the man in the delivery room who held his partner's hand through every contraction, who cut the cord, who cried when the baby was placed on her chest. I'd seen some of those same women come back months later for a follow-up, and the man wasn't with them. He'd been there for the birth, there for the first week, maybe the first month. Then the visits got shorter. The excuses got longer. One day, the car seat was only in one car.
Wanting wasn't the problem. Wanting was easy on the first day. The birth certificate was the part where wanting became legal, and legal didn't guarantee he'd still be standing in the room a year from now.
I left the father's fields blank.
The pen moved past the empty boxes, down to the signature line. I signed my name. The ink went down clean. The form went from a decision to a document in about thirty seconds.
I put the clipboard back on the tray. My hands were shaking. Not a lot. Enough that I noticed.
Tita came back ten minutes later. She picked up the clipboard, glanced at the form, and tucked it under her arm. She didn't look at the father's section.
"I'll get this filed, honey."
She left. The form left with her.
The knock came a few minutes later. I was expecting Colleen.
"Come in."
The door opened.
Duke.
He was in a clean T-shirt and jeans. His hair was damp, pushed back from his forehead, and he hadn't shaved. He looked like he'd slept about as well as I had, which was hardly at all, and he was still handsome in a way that irritated me. The dark circles under his eyes didn't help. The jaw did.
His hands were at his sides. Not in his pockets. The man who came through this door yesterday was stunned. The man standing in the doorway this morning had spent the night staring at the ceiling and had arrived at something.
He stayed near the door. His eyes went to the bassinet for a second, then back to me.
"How are you feeling?"
"Like I had a baby on a highway."
His mouth twitched. Not the full grin. Just the corner. "Fair."
A beat. He shifted his weight. Whatever he'd come here to say was sitting behind his teeth, and I watched him work up to it.
"I thought about it," he said.
I waited.
