Afterward, he gathered me in against his chest, his arm heavy and certain across me, his mouth at my nape. The field had gone full dark in the window, and by the sink the second mug satbeside the first where I’d left it. I lay there in the place I’d built for one, the whole warm length of him at my back, and didn’t want a single thing I didn’t already have.
“Let’s stay like this forever,” I said.
His arm tightened. “Not going anywhere, darlin’.”
My phone rang.
Past midnight. The nurse in me had the arithmetic done before I was off the bed — across the cold floor, digging the phone out of my jeans before I’d properly decided to.
Stephy. My stomach dropped a clean inch.
“Steph?”
“Hi.” Her voice came high and careful and breathless in a way I recognized, professionally and personally, inside the same half-second. “So. Don’t panic?—”
“I’m a nurse, Stephanie. I don’t panic.Youpanic?—”
“—but my water broke about twenty minutes ago, and the contractions are already closer together than the book says they’re supposed to be this early, and Liam—” A pause. A long, controlled breath, the kind you ride out over the top of a wave. Behind her, at a distance, I could hear my brother. The Texas Ranger. The man who walked toward gunfire for a paycheck. He was sayingwhere are the keys, Steph, where did you put the keys,in the voice of a man who’d had his entire skeleton removed.
“—Liam is being tremendously helpful,” Stephy finished, dry as a creek bed, and I loved her so much in that second, I could have sat down on the floor and cried.
“Okay.” I was already into my jeans one-handed, phone pinned to my shoulder. Caleb had sat up the instant he heard her name; now he was up and into his clothes without a single question asked, because he read a room faster than other men read a clock. “Okay. Breathe through the next one, don’t push for anybody, andespeciallynot for Liam. We’re coming.”
“We,” said Stephy. And even mid-labor, I heard her catch the word and hold it up to the light.
“We,” I said.
I hung up. Caleb was holding my boots out to me, keys already hooked on one finger, the cabin warm and dark andoursat our backs and the whole loud, bright chaos of my family waiting at the far end of twenty miles of road.
“It’s time,” I said.
33
Sophia
The dark came at us in pieces — mailbox, mailbox, the dead Sinclair station, then the long black stretch where the county road gave up on streetlights and trusted you to know it by heart. Caleb knew it by heart. He held the truck steady at sixty and didn’t say a word, because he’d worked out in the first half-mile that I needed the quiet to do my arithmetic.
And I was doing arithmetic. I couldn’t stop.
Water broke half an hour ago. Contractions inside five minutes if Steph’s count was good, and Steph’s count was always good. First baby, so the book said hours yet, the book said breathe, the book said there’s time. The book had never met Stephanie, who did everything early and apologized to no one for it. My nurse-brain went hunting for a monitor that wasn’t in the truck, a strip to time, a number to check, and came back with my own two hands lying useless in my lap. The nothing for them to do was its own small horror.
“Breathe,” Caleb said. Not to Steph. To me.
“I am breathing. I’m a professional breather. It’s ninety percent of the?—”
My phone lit. Liam.
“Talk to me,” I said.
“Soph.” One syllable, and the whole of my brother was in it, undone. “Soph, the contractions, they’re?—”
“How far apart?”
A silence with a man drowning in the middle of it. “I couldn’t find the keys.Shefound the keys. She’s in labor and she found her own car keys, Soph, while I stood there?—“
“Liam. Are you driving?”
“…Yes.”
