Epilogue 1 （Coaching His Wife）
MOLLY
January
I go into labour in the middle of the night.
It’s minus twenty five outside, but Jeff’s new truck has a block heater and a remote starter, and by the time he gets me dressed between contractions, it’s nice and toasty for the drive from Wildflower Hollow down the highway to Climax Springs Regional Hospital.
The Labour and Delivery nurse takes one look at me, and the extended contraction that has me moaning and gripping the doorframe, and she gets me a room.
“You’ve got this, mama,” she promises.
And I don’t feel like I do, not at all, but then Jeff is there, and he’s as good a coach in this moment as he is on the baseball diamond.
“This is dad?” the nurse asks as he takes off his coat and crouches in front of me.
The intensity of his gaze, locked in on me, is probably her first clue.
The second would be the way a flood of emotion pours out of me as soon as he’s back, because now I can let go and trust that he’s got me.
“It hurts,” I sob as he gives me his hands to squeeze.
“I know, baby. It’s going to be okay.”
Together, he and the nurse get me into a hospital gown that feels like sandpaper. I don’t want it on my skin, I don’t want anything touching me at all except my husband.
“That’s okay,” the nurse says. “Just listen to your body.”
“My body is ripping itself in two,” I manage to get out.
She makes a humming sound as she checks my progress. “That’s because you’re ready to push, mama. Zero to sixty for a first timer. I’ll page the doctor.”
“Everything is a fucking whirlwind with you,” Jeff says, and it’s not a complaint. He’s beaming at me. “Focus on me. Just like that. Hold my hand and breathe, baby, breathe. Deeper, that’s it. You’re so strong.”
“I’m going to die.”
“Don’t do that.” He smiles as the contraction fades, making his eyes crinkle. “There you go. Have some water and then you’ll do that again.”
“I don’t want to.”
“You want what’s on the other side, though. He’s going to have your lungs. Is it too late to call him Zero to Sixty? That would be a great name.”
“Don’t make me laugh.”
“I love to make you laugh.” He leans in and presses his forehead against mine. “I love everything about you. Your laughter. Your tears. Your absolutely incredible body that can do incredible things. Here we go, breathe, breathe, keep breathing, that’s it, growl at me…”
On and on it goes, like endless punishing waves that get bigger and bigger until I’m fully consumed in the storm of my body birthing a future baseball slugger.
When Gideon Rosehill finally slides into the world, he’s a beast of a baby, ten pounds, three ounces of pure, furious joy.
Jeff wraps himself around both of us as we stare at our baby on my chest.
“He’s here,” I whisper.
“You did it,” he whispers back.
And then at the same time, we both say I love you, and I immediately forget all the agony of the delivery.
“Babies born at the start of the year have a statistical advantage in sport,” Sinclaire says when she arrives mid-morning for a sister visit, bringing me and her dad two much needed lattes.
“I don’t care about any of that,” Jeff says as he rocks Gideon, now swaddled in a baby blue flannel, and passed out from his second nursing of the morning. “He can be a mathematician like you if he wants. Or a lumberjack. Or a painter.”
I grin at her and take a sip of my coffee. “Thank you for this.”
She beams at me, so much like her father that it makes my chest hurt. “No, thank you for this,” she whispers, pointing at her dad. “Thank you for bringing him here.”
Settling in Wildflower Hollow ended up being exactly the right decision for us. We came to visit right after Jeff announced his retirement, and it was a miserable weekend, the first icy storm of the season.
I was massively pregnant.
There weren’t a ton of houses to choose from.
But we only needed to find one, the right one, and we did. A charming, sprawling place on a quiet cul de sac, with a basketball net already installed over the garage door and a baseball diamond a short walk away.
It doesn’t have a white picket fence yet, but Jeff is going to put one in next summer—in between Little League practices.