Sterling looked at his hands. They weren’t entirely steady. He put them in his pockets.
“That’s not better,” Jasper said.
Sterling crossed his arms again.
Mitch reported from his chair: “He’s been like this since the first phone call.”
“I have not been like anything,” Sterling protested.
“You called Jasper twice.”
“That was a precaution.”
“Precautions are typically singular,” Mitch said. “The second one is panic.”
“I don’t panic.”
“The phone-down-phone-up cycle suggests otherwise.”
I said, from the bed: “Both of you stop talking.”
They both stopped. Immediately. Complete silence. The kind of silence that suggested I had just discovered a superpower I hadn’t known I possessed, and I filed it away for future use because some authority was worth keeping.
Jasper looked at me. “How far apart?”
“Six minutes,” I said.
“Good.” He set his bag on the dresser. “We have time.”
Sterling’s jaw worked. I could see him calculating—six minutes, distance to the clinic, variables, contingencies—and I watched the muscle in his cheek jump once, hard, before he settled back against the wall with the stillness of a man who had decided that standing perfectly still was the next best thing to being useful.
Decker leaned in the doorway, arms crossed, watching Jasper with the quiet focus of a man who had done this before and knew his role. He nodded once at Sterling—the kind of nod that said I see you and this is normal and you’re going to be fine even if you don’t believe it—and Sterling nodded back, which from Sterling was approximately equivalent to anyone else writing a love letter.
Another contraction hit. I breathed through it the way Jasper had taught me, slow and deliberate, and Mitch’s hand found mine across the bedspread without looking, warm and certain.
On my other side, Sterling’s presence was a solid weight against the headboard, not touching yet, just there, just steady,and the coordination of it—three people in a room finding the rhythm without discussion—made my chest do that thing again, the warm one, the one that felt like coming home.
“Okay,” Jasper said. “Let’s get to work.”
I looked at Mitch. At Sterling. At the warm yellow walls of the bedroom we had built together, and I thought, clear as anything: We’re having a baby, actually having a baby.
The contraction eased.
The room held.
Sterling’s hand settled on my shoulder, warm through the thin fabric of my t-shirt, and he didn’t say anything, which was perfect, because Sterling not saying anything was its own kind of eloquence, and right now it was exactly what I needed.
Labor unfolded the way Jasper said it would—not fast, not slow, just steady and specific and entirely its own thing. He worked with the calm of a man who had done this nine thousand times and would do it nine thousand more, keeping up a low commentary I found genuinely helpful in a way that surprised me.
“That’s good pressure,” he’d say, or “Breathe through the peak,” and I’d do it because Jasper’s voice carried the authority of someone who knew what he was talking about and wasn’t performing it for anyone’s benefit.
Mitch held my left hand. His grip was warm and solid and slightly too tight, which was Mitch—everything at 110 percent, even restraint.
Sterling stood at my right shoulder with his hand braced against the small of my back, not moving, just there, a solid weight I could lean into when the contractions hit. He didn’t talk. Sterling Callahan rationed words in the best of circumstances, and these were not the best of circumstances.
At one point, between contractions, he leaned down. His mouth was close to my ear, his breath warm against my skin, and he said, very quietly, just for me: “You’re doing good.”
Three words. From Sterling, that was approximately equivalent to anyone else writing an epic. I reached up and squeezed his wrist, once, hard, and didn’t say anything because my throat had done something complicated and words were currently surplus to requirements.
