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How was it that I was the calm one? He’d already had a baby. Well, Valerie’d had a baby. He’d just been there. Had he been this worked up, then?
The line finally dipped, and Emma flopped her head back and took a few shaky breaths. “Thank you, Sophie.”
“I’m sorry.” Neil patted Emma’s hand. “It’s difficult to see your child in pain.”
“Yeah, this must be really hard for you,” she snapped. “Where’s Mum? She won’t answer her goddamned phone.”
“Your mother is in London. Her assistant is going to keep trying, and she’ll be on the first flight possible,” Neil promised.
“She’s my backup!” Emma started to push herself up from the bed, as though she could just march over to England and get Valerie, but Neil gently urged her back down. She covered her face with her hands. “I can’t do this with just Michael! He’s so fucking stupid!”
“You’re just saying that because you’re in labor,” Neil interjected. I widened my eyes and slowly shook my head at him, but it was too late. He’d already been patronizing enough.
“Hey, uh, maybe we should…” I motioned toward the door.
Emma fixed a hopeful gaze on me. “Stay, Sophie? Please?”
That knocked me back a step, literally. Emma and I had come a long way toward liking each other, but I had no idea we were on stay-with-me-while-I-suffer-through-labor terms. If I didn’t rank as high as Neil or Michael, and she was saying all these horrible things about and to them, what the hell was she going to say to me? “Are you sure?”
“I just need somebody who is actually sympathetic and not a dismissive male ass.” Her mouth turned down in the saddest face I’d ever seen on her. She looked like she was going to cry.
I thought back to the July before, when Neil had been so super sick and the due date of my terminated pregnancy had rolled around. At the time, Neil’s survival had still been touch-and-go, and I’d thought about what it would have been like if I’d kept our baby. Would I have delivered alone, without any support system at all?
No. Emma would have stayed with me.
That hypothetical created an obligation I couldn’t ignore. I motioned Neil away and took the armchair beside Emma’s bed. “Go on. Go find Michael, and you guys can worry together.”
He lingered uncertainly, reluctant to go. “If you need anything—”
“I’ll come get you,” I assured him. I was so proud of myself for taking charge and helping Emma out that my confidence swelled to epic proportions. Wow, maybe I could do this. I could be a nurse or something, if I weren’t doing the whole fashion magazine thing. Or a doctor! What if I went to medical school and became an obstetrician?
“Oh, fuck me, another one already?” Emma sat up then doubled over and groaned. The spiky line thing went way higher this time and plateaued for longer. What the fuck was I supposed to do? Rub her back? Talk her through it? Tell her to bear down, like they did in the movies?
Well, there went that confidence.
There was a knock at the door, and I hoped, though I knew it was extremely unlikely, that Valerie was on the other side. It was a nurse, a young woman with dark hair pulled back in a thick French braid. “How are we doing?”
“Fine,” Emma said, though she was still out of breath. “Is this about as bad as it gets?”
“Um…” The nurse looked away quickly, fiddling with something on the monitor cart. “You know, I wouldn’t know? I’ve never had a baby.”
I could practically hear the nuclear detonation of fury going off in Emma’s head.
“Can I get you anything?” the nurse asked. “Ice chips? Some water?”
“Sure, whatever.” She closed her eyes again. “Can we turn the lights down? My head is doing me in.”
“You’re in labor, and you have a headache?” I blurted. “That sucks.”
“Do you really think so, Sophie?” Emma snapped, and I figured I should probably hold my tongue.
Labor apparently takes longer than it does in the movies. Emma dozed off when she could, as the hours ticked on, but because of her headache, they made her keep a blood pressure cuff on. It would randomly swell up and piss her off, which was super helpful. Sometimes, Michael went out for coffee, sometimes, I did. The smell made Emma sick, so we took turns stepping into the hallway to chug it and chew some gum before we went back in.
I checked on Neil every now and then, to get an update about Valerie’s geographical location and also to make sure he hadn’t chewed all of his fingernails down to nubs.
“How is she doing?” he asked when I came out the third time.
“She’s dilated to six? I don’t know what that means. But she seems to be doing okay.” I shrugged and checked the clock. It wasn’t really four in the morning, was it? “Does it always take this long?”
