Chapter 4
B uzzing with energy, I locked the back gate, jogged around to my car, and tried not to think about how satisfying it would be if a certain brutal stranger stepped out of the shadows right now and told me I wasn’t going anywhere.
Instead, I got in the car and my Honda wheezed to life.
The drive across town was muscle memory.
King to Calhoun to Rutledge, the city’s bones shining under gas lanterns and Spanish moss.
I passed a cluster of tipsy ghost-tour people pointing at a brick wall like it owed them an apparition.
A couple kissed sloppily under a live oak.
Somewhere, a bar cheer rose and fell, the tides of other people’s nights reaching me through cracked windows.
As the Medical University of South Carolina complex came into view, I felt that familiar click inside me. Another life is coming.
My life, for the next unknown hours, will orbit someone else’s body. It’s the best and strangest job on earth. You prepare for chaos and then you bow to it.
Palmetto Birth Center sat two blocks away, tucked inside a renovated brick building with soft lighting and a porch swing no one actually used during labor but everyone took pictures on afterward.
There’s a regulation about proximity—birth centers have to be within a quick dash of a hospital.
As if any mother in transition has time to admire zoning maps.
Still, it looked comforting in the glow, a lighthouse for the soft revolt of unmedicated birth.
I parked, texted I’m here , and hustled up the steps. The lobby was dim. A salt lamp pooled peachy light. I heard the low murmur of water—the big tub in Suite B filling—and the deeper music of a woman finding her sound.
“Simone,” called Lexie Scott, one of the midwives, from the hall. She was five foot nothing and made of steel wool and honey. “She’s active. Bloody show, good swell, baby’s lively. BP fine. You’re on counter-pressure and comic relief.”
“My specialities,” I said, dumping my bag and scrubbing my hands. “Any requests?”
“She likes peppermint oil and affirmations that aren’t corny.” Lexie’s mouth twitched. “Which is to say … do your Simone thing.”
My Simone thing. Be the village. Be the ballast. Make her laugh between waves and make her wild within them.
I slipped into Suite B.
The room was a womb: low lights, the tub a moon of warm water, a strand of fairy lights draped around a ficus that had seen more primal noises than any plant should.
Talia stood by the bed, knees bent, hands braced on her husband Harry’s shoulders. She swayed like the tide. Sweat slicked her hairline. Her jaw was relaxed because she’d listened to me and was an A+ student.
“Hey, mama,” I whispered, sliding in behind her with a hand to her sacrum. “You look strong.”
She rolled her head toward me, eyes glazed with labor’s beautiful natural drugs. “I feel like a haunted house.”
“Good,” I said lightly. “Open the doors and let the ghosts scream.”
She huffed a laugh, then sucked in a breath as the next contraction rose.
We moved. That’s most of doula work: choreography with the ego removed.
When her body said lean, I became a wall.
When she said back, I receded. Counter-pressure with the heel of my hand, slow circles at her pelvis, cool cloth at her neck.
Harry whispered I love yous against her hair.
The tub steamed. Lexie’s assistant padded in and out, checking heart tones, the quiet beeping of time.
“You’re doing it,” I murmured into the space near her ear as a surge gutted her and passed. “Every wave ends. Every one.”
“I can’t,” she panted.
“You already are,” I said, because truth is the only thing that holds in this room.
Minutes turned to an hour and then to something that wasn’t time at all. Birth erases clocks. We tried the rebozo, the toilet throne of humility, the tub where she finally sighed like the water remembered her.
“I hate everyone,” she whispered at one point, forehead to tile.
“I’m honored to be included,” I whispered back.
Another surge bent her. She gutted out a low sound, the kind that vibrates your bones if you’re standing too close.
Perfect. Productive. My favorite song.
I held pressure and thought about my own body. About control. About surrender. How I spend all day teaching women to soften the parts of themselves that clench against pain. How I am so good at it for others and so terrible at it for myself.
I thought about my circle in the yard, all of us under the moon promising to let go. And then I thought about a letter that asked a stranger to take the letting out of my hands.
A knock of knuckles on the doorframe pulled me back. Lexie, eyes bright, chin set. “We’ve got a soft anterior lip. Baby’s coming down gorgeous. Talia, you want to try a side-lying release or keep loving on the tub?”
“Don’t make me leave the water,” Talia begged.
“Okay,” Lexie soothed, already donning another glove. “We’ll catch in the pool. You’re safe. Your body knows the way.”
No hospital in the world could ever sound like that. I loved them for what they were, the ones with bright lights and crash carts and miracles that stitched back the world. But this? This was where the sacred felt practical. Where the practical felt sacred.
Another hour, and the room changed. It always does. A gravity shift, a scent shift—the primal iron-sweet of near-birth, the electricity of a portal opening. Talia’s sounds went from wide to downward. My own spine answered, like some ancient string between us tugged tight.
“I need to push,” she said, shock in her voice, like it was a confession.
“Then bear down,” Lexie said. “With your whole body. That’s it. Again. Again.”
Harry cried. I braced Talia from behind in the tub, my forearms under her arms, my chest to her shoulder blades while she curled around her baby and became the animal she’d always been.
“Bring your jaw soft,” I murmured, and maybe I was talking to myself. “Let it be big. Let it be loud.”
She roared. The room smiled. You never get used to it. You never, ever should.
Two pushes later—a pause, a stretch, a holy burn—there he was. A baby boy, all vernix and indignation, stunned and furious and perfect. The world exhaled. Harry sob-laughed. Talia collapsed into him, tears and sweat and relief in a knot.
I cried like I always do. Quietly. A leak, not a flood. It’s not my story, but my body notices, anyway. There’s that click again. The one that says something began here, and I witnessed it.
Lexie did her capable magic while we did ours—warm blankets, shocked laughter, the first latch that always makes my heart skip a beat. We whispered the same lies and truths we always do: You did it and It was always you and He’s so beautiful I could die .
An hour later, the tub was drained, the bed made, lights lower, baby pink and full-bellied and stubbornly awake because he did not come to sleep through life.
Harry snored in the chair with the worst ergonomic design in Charleston.
Talia stroked tiny hair with the look of someone who had found the edge of herself and came back with a trophy.
My body remembered tiredness all at once.
The high faded to a soft hum. I stuffed extra snacks on Talia’s bedside table, told her she was a goddess, told Harry to drink a gallon of water when he woke, and drifted back toward the lobby, on-call bag shoulder-biting, hair doing that thing where it pretends to be a golden halo but is actually golden chaos.
Lexie caught me at the door, leaning a hip against the counter. “You look like the moon chewed you up and spit you out.”
“She did,” I said. “Right into a birth pool.”
She smiled with her eyes, which is the only way I accept smiles after 2 a.m. “Text me when you get home.”
“I will.”
Outside, the night had tipped toward morning. That pillow-blue hour when the birds gossip and the city tries to remember how to be quiet. The MUSC windows glowed like a constellation.
I leaned against my car and breathed the air like it might tell me who I was.
Doula. Sister. Shop owner. Head witch of the backyard bonfire. Woman who could locate a cervix with her eyes closed and could not, for the life of her, locate her own desire.
I laughed into the empty lot. It sounded a little hysterical, a little thrilled.
Because new life always tipped something in me. Not a baby fever—God, no, I didn’t want that for myself. Not anytime soon. But a reminder. Of what bodies are for. Of what pain can become when it’s invited. Of what surrender does when you stop narrating it.
I unlocked the car. Slid in. My phone lit the dash with three texts:
Mom: You up? Gardenias blooming like crazy. Bring clippers tomorrow.
Darla: Milo says tell you his mustache is not a phase.
Unknown: —S
My throat closed. Heat sprinted through every hallway of my body like a fire alarm tripped.
I tapped. Opened.
No new message. Just the last thing I’d sent—to Alpha Mail. The draft I’d written in the Notes app before I’d had the guts to paste it into an email.
I closed it fast, like it might burn my fingertips.
“Coward,” I told myself.
I drove home the long way. Past the harbor where the water made that hush-hush sound at the seawall. Past the quiet bars and the drunk girls eating pizza on the curb in sparkly heels that now wanted to be flats. Past the corner where a man in a neon vest hosed off the night.
I thought about the letter. About the way my body had responded to a man I hadn’t met yet like he’d already touched me. About how I’d spent hours in a room begging a woman I adore to let go—and how little I’d practiced that sermon on myself.
By the time I pulled into my driveway, the eastern sky had gone soft and gray, and the big live oak over my house looked like a ship’s sails in silhouette. My yard still wore the aftermath of the ceremony—the cushions, the smudged bowl, the empty jar of Moon Mist.
I went inside, dropped my bag, and poured a glass of water. My body hummed. My brain, traitor, clicked over to the list—restock nipple balm, email the cloth diaper vendor, update next week’s newborn care class, call Stephen about the party, remind Mom to stop micromanaging the twins.
I sank onto the sofa and set an alarm for two hours—sleep in installments, the doula way. My eyes closed. My phone buzzed one more time.
Unknown number: Lady .
Just that. One word. Capital L, like a title. Like a dare.
I sat up so fast I saw stars. The message stared back at me, simple as a match.
Another buzz followed. Same number.
Full moon makes for restless nights. Leave your porch light on.
The air went thin.
I told myself it could be a prank. That someone at the circle had seen my Notes app. That this was Charleston and everyone knew everyone else’s business in three moves or less.
Then a third message.
Two nights. Be ready.
I didn’t reply. I didn’t breathe. I didn’t do anything except sit there with the world narrowed to a glowing phone screen and the drum of my pulse in my ears.
Out back, a stray tea light I’d missed flickered on the steps as dawn yawned open.
“Okay,” I whispered to no one. To him. To myself. “Okay.”
I slid the phone under my thigh like that could muffle fate, pressed my palms to my eyes until colors burst, and let a laugh leak out—sharp, a little feral.
Because the full moon had come and done her work.
She’d brought a baby.
And maybe, she’d also brought my ruin.