“This is exactly how the horror movie starts,” Landon said. “I get complacent, you tell me I’m the last person an evil spirit would target, and my face ends up slashed end to end like I fell into a meat grinder.”
Rose chuckled. “You want to call it all off? I know a good ice cream shop, and I would hate for you to lose half the skin on your handsome face just when we were really starting to get to know each other.”
Handsome.She thought he was handsome. That was certainly better than ice cream. He gritted his teeth. “Come on then,” he said. “Let’s get this over with.”
Rose shifted beside him, her feet like two sides of a scale trying to settle. Then she reached for his hand. She’d done it before, on top of Arthur’s Seat. It had felt friendly up there, like she was saying ‘Look at this! Can you believe this? How lucky are we?’ This felt different—a decision rather than a joyful reflex. And it did not feelfriendly.
Landon did not call attention to it. But he knew that something was shifting between them. That they would walk away from the night changed.
Chapter Twenty
Her water woke her at four in the morning, breaking all over their sheets and then the bathroom floor. She ambled back to their bedroom, rocking Landon awake. “This is it,” she said. Notoriously hard to wake, Landon leaped into action immediately, grabbing their packed hospital bag from the closet and rushing downstairs to make Rose two sandwiches for the car ride, on the off chance labor progressed so quickly she wouldn’t be able to eat once they admitted her. As instructed, Rose called her gynecologist’s emergency line. She expected a swift “Okay, it’s go-time!” What she got was “Sit tight. Bounce on your pregnancy ball, have a cup of tea, and see if contractions start. If they do, come right in. If they don’t, make your way here around nine.”
So, she bounced. And while she bounced, Landon paced. He wore a timer around his neck like he’d been appointed the baby’s Little League coach from the womb, and popped into the living room to ask her if her abdomen had started tightening every five minutes. But it hadn’t.
Five hours later, it still hadn’t.
Six hours after her water broke, Rose lay in a hospital bed, feeling absolutely fine. The whole scene surprised her. Wasn’t shesupposed to be in the kind of pain they showed in the movies, clinging to the rails of her hospital bed, screaming for an epidural? Landon sat beside her in a hard chair that he would pull out into a bed when nighttime came, every muscle in his body on alert—though the sitting was a marked improvement from the pacing.
A nurse walked into the room and gave Rose a wan smile. “Nothing’s moving yet?” she asked, the hope clear in her voice.
“Not yet.” It was still early in the day—not even noon—but Rose felt dejected. She’d given the baby so much these last nine months. Why couldn’t the baby give her this?
“You were only about a fingertip dilated on your last check, so the doctor wants to speed things up. Because your water’s already broken, we really want baby out within forty-eight hours.”
“Forty-eight hours?” Landon all but screamed. “How is that even in question?”
The nurse looked at him with rote sympathy. “You took the hospital’s birthing class, right?”
“We did,” Rose said.
“Well, then you know that this is all very normal. Some babies come fast, and some come slow. Baby is just cozy in there.” Rose appreciated the attention to gender-neutrality. It had been Landon’s idea to wait initially, but it didn’t take her long to come around. Waiting somehow made it all feel more real, not less.
“We’re going to start you on some drugs to get things moving,” the nurse said. “Cytotec for your cervix, to start. If your body doesn’t start contracting on its own, we may use Pitocin later to help get things going. But we’ll take it slow and give you a chance to respond first.”
“I guess this is why birth plans are so controversial,” Rose said, half amused, half resigned. “Mine’s out the window.”
“Flexibility is the thing,” the nurse said with a smile.
“New plan,” Rose said, bending sideways to grab Landon’s hand. “Don’t die.”
The nurse chuckled. Landon’s grip on her hand loosened. “I’ll be back in a few minutes with your first dose. You just keep eating and drinking, yeah? Honestly, the cafeteria here isn’t all that bad.”
Rose stabbed a fork into the salty chicken pot pie on her tray table. “I’ve been stuffing my face since four in the morning.”
“That’s what I like to hear.”
The moment she was out of sight, Landon stood and shook his arms so hard Rose thought maybe they’d fallen asleep during the short exchange. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Don’t tell me you’re already flagging when we’ve still got hours to go. Or days, maybe? I don’t really want to believe this could go on for forty-eight hours, but at least eventually they’ll give me some of the good drugs.”
He ran a hand through his thick hair and pulled. “I don’t want to tell you how to act right now, Rose,” he said. “I have no business telling you how to do anything right now, but could you please,pleasenot talk about dying? I will be anything you need me to be today, but I can’t fathom—” He choked on the words. “I just can’t talk about it. Not here. Not when the stakes are so high.”
“Landon—”
“I am so, so sorry. I promised I wouldn’t put anything on you today, literally anything.”
“Landon,” she said, “take a deep breath, okay? For me?” He did as she instructed, his arms slowly relaxing, shoulders coming down from around his ears. “Great. Now, listen. I am not going to die.”
“See, even you saying that—”
