“Then drive. That’s the entire job. You point the truck at the hospital, and you do not, under any circumstances, deliver commentary.”
“She made a sound, Sophia. I’ve never heard her?—"
“That’s labor, you absolute Ranger. It’smeantto sound like that. Put me on speaker.”
A fumble, a wash of road noise, then Steph over the top of it, bright and breathless: “Tell your brother I’m fine andhe’sthe one who needs the epidural.”
“You’re fine, and he needs the epidural,” I relayed.
“I HEARD HER,” said Liam, in the voice of a man being audited by God. Stephy popped back on to say they had just gotten to the hospital.
The corner of Caleb’s mouth went up and came back down, and he took the merge onto the highway a hair faster.
The county hospital rose up out of the dark, low and lit, the ER sign burning red against the field. I’d walked through those doors a thousand mornings. A few nights ago, I’d walked out with my own blood drying on the floor at my back. Tonight was the opposite, and I let myself feel the size of that for exactly one breath before I had my belt off and my hand on the door, still rolling.
“Park it and come find us,” I told him.
“Go.” He reached to squeeze my knee once. “I’ve got you.”
I went.
The room waswarm and low-lit and full of machinery I knew in my sleep, and I was on it before the door finished swinging.
The strip first — I read it over the L&D nurse’s shoulder like it was mine to read, which it wasn’t. Contractions stacking close and clean, a good trace, the baby riding it like a pro. Steph half-sat against a hill of pillows, hair stuck to her forehead, and Liam stood at the head of the bed gripping her hand white-knuckled in both of his, a man holding the only rail on a sinking ship.
“You’re at six,” I said, because I’d looked. “That’s fast, that’s good, that’s exactly where we want?—”
“Sophia.” The nurse, kind-eyed and unbothered, reclaimed her monitor. “I’ve got the trace.”
“Right. Yes. Of course you do.” I stepped back half a foot and fixed Steph’s pillow instead, then her water cup, then the angle of the fan, because my hands had found three jobs and meant to do all of them.
A contraction climbed. Steph’s whole body went into it.
“Breathe down,” I coached. “Down and out, long as you can?—”
“I — have —read— this — too,” Steph got out through her teeth, and even cresting it, she found the air to add, “you absolute hypocrite.”
The wave broke. She sagged. I had ice chips at her mouth before she’d finished exhaling.
“How is he?” she asked, eyes shut, meaning Liam.
I looked at my brother. The Texas Ranger. The man who’d once cleared a building with a cracked rib and never mentionedthe rib. He was the color of skim milk and hadn’t produced a complete sentence since I walked in.
“He’s thriving,” I said.
“I can hear you,” Liam said. Very small.
“We know, baby,” Steph told him, and patted the hand strangling hers, and then to me, low: “If he goes down, leave him where he lands. We are not pausing the baby for him.”
“Noted. Step over the body. Maintain eye contact with the prize.”
Then the next one came harder, too soon behind the last, and the bright easy thing between us went out of the room like a candle in a draught.
This was the part I was built for. I went down into the cold clean place I went when a trauma bay filled up, where I stopped being anybody’s anything and became a set of hands and a list. Timing on my phone. Watching her face for the pain that meant trouble against the pain that was only the work. Use was the only thing I’d ever trusted myself to give the people I loved. Comfort was a language I’d lost a long time ago, in a room I didn’t visit. But I’d built a life out of being useful at the bedsides of strangers, and here, at last, was a bedside that was mine, and I was going to be so useful she’d never know how frightened I was.
Steph’s hand shot out mid-wave and clamped around my wrist.
Not for comfort. Hard — the grip a laboring woman has, that could crack walnuts.
