London, Five Months Earlier
Jones knew that you could not stay in a relationship out of pity.
That was an awful thing to do. But he also knew that Aspen was struggling, and had been every day since her father’s death.
She’d recently fallen out with Bridget, too, which was hitting her hard considering all the issues she had with her mother.
And it wasn’t that Jones didn’t care for Aspen or enjoy his time with her.
In fact, it had been very easy to slide into her life.
Her friends were becoming his friends, which was handy, since he’d lost many of his own in the breakup of his marriage.
Her belongings now peppered his sparse bachelor pad, giving it her signature style—classy, candle-heavy, lots of velvet cushions in earth tones.
He was almost shocked to discover how easy it was to stay in a relationship that he knew, deep in his gut, was not quite right.
It did not occur to him that it might have an impact on him that he could not yet see. That faking contentment came at a cost, and waiting to leave her meant putting both their lives on hold.
—
On a crisp day in early April, Aspen suggested a trip to the theater with a couple of new friends.
Jones wasn’t a theater person—he found theater people either intimidatingly cool (floaty, posh, lots of jewelry) or enthusiastically uncool (loud, overfriendly, constantly changing hair color) and neither variety ever seemed to take to him.
But lately Aspen was picking up new friends all the time and wanted to do different things, really make the most of London, and he saw this as a good sign.
In the early stages of her grief, she’d not wanted to go anywhere at all.
It was a matinee, as they would both be working in the evening, something he was already dreading—work, like all elements of his life, had become increasingly stressful and unenjoyable.
The roads were thick with traffic on their walk from the tube, and the air smelled distinctively like London: warm car fumes, petrichor. Jones found himself longing for fresh air and a little space—London was losing its charm of late.
“So they won’t talk in the Shakespeare kind of way?” he said to Aspen.
Her red hair was piled on top of her head, exposing the sweeping line of her neck above her collarless jacket.
She looked breathtakingly beautiful. Why did he not feel it the way he should?
It was as if she were a work of art he didn’t understand—the fault lay in him, he knew, but how could he correct it?
“They will,” Aspen said distractedly, searching through her handbag. “But they’ll be dressed in modern clothes.”
“Oh,” Jones said. That wasn’t going to help much.
“If you don’t want to come, I can just go with Marc and Stefano,” Aspen said.
“No, no,” Jones said hastily. “I’m looking forward to it.”
He’d just get himself a drink and zone out. In these sorts of situations Jones had an ability to think about absolutely nothing if he had to—a kind of meditative state, but without any of the resulting zen. More like…an off switch. He had been relying on it a lot lately.
They made their way through the crowds on the pavement with the ease of consummate Londoners—parting midconversation for two influencers with selfie sticks, turning sideways to make room for the vendor selling caramelized nuts from a cart.
But one particular car horn cut through the usual hubbub: an Uber driver was hooting repeatedly.
“What’s…oh,” Aspen said, standing on tiptoes.
A crowd was gathering around a gray sedan in the bus lane, stuck behind a string of number 26 buses.
Aspen slipped into the bustle so fast she lost Jones for a moment, and by the time he’d pushed through, she was on her knees beside the car’s open door, and there was blood all over her cream collarless jacket.
His heart stopped. A woman was screaming from inside the car, a guttural roar.
“She can’t have a baby here,” someone in the crowd said. “She’ll die.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Aspen snapped, shrugging off her jacket, always keeping her grip on the woman’s leg, just switching hands. “I’m a midwife. She’s perfectly safe. She’s doing brilliantly. If you don’t have anything helpful to say, give me your coat.”
“My coat?” the man said, dumbfounded. “What for?”
“To catch the baby in,” Aspen said, with satisfaction.
The man backed out of the crowd. Aspen glanced around, searching for Jones. The woman was kneeling on all fours on the back seat, her long skirt covering her from the onlookers, her face invisible inside the vehicle.
“I’m here,” Jones said, pushing through to stand at Aspen’s side. “What can I do?”
He’d already taken off his coat and handed it to her.
“Can you go around and talk to her? Tell me if she seems woozy? She’s in transition.
Her pulse is good, but I’ve not had time to check more than that.
” She cursed. “I wish I had my bag with me. Gloria, you said, right? Gloria, you’re doing great.
I’m just sending a colleague around to talk to you through the other door, OK?
She’s got nobody with her but the Uber driver, who’s on the phone to the ambulance,” Aspen added in a mutter to Jones. “Try to act midwifely.”
Jones looked up toward the driver’s seat, where he saw the blank, panicked face of a young man in driving gloves with a phone pressed to his cheek. This man had gone through fearing for his upholstery and was now visibly concerned that someone might perish in his back seat.
“On it,” Jones said, already moving around the car.
The woman didn’t lift her head when he opened the other passenger door. She was half-hidden behind a tangle of sweat-soaked hair, and her shoulders shook with sobs.
“This is not how it was supposed to happen,” she said, voice hoarse. “There’s a birth plan in my bag. My sister’s meeting me at the hospital.”
Jones covered her hand with his on the car seat.
“Please,” she said. “I can’t do this.”
Aspen talked about work a lot, so Jones knew losing faith like this wasn’t just common in transition—the very last stage before the baby came—but a symptom of it. If Gloria wanted to give up, that meant she was almost there.
“You can. You can do it,” Jones said, trying to channel Aspen’s confidence, though he actually couldn’t imagine how Gloria would be able to do this at all.
Gloria roared her way through another contraction.
Jones gripped her hand. Aspen always made birth sound so beautiful—she was passionate about giving women a voice in their own labor, about rewriting the cultural narrative around birth.
But this just seemed…terrifying. His ex-wife had known she didn’t want children, so the idea of childbirth wasn’t something he’d ever dedicated much time to thinking about, and though they’d talked in the abstract about labor when Aspen discussed her job, he’d had no idea it would be like this.
It was absolutely wild. How on earth had mankind kidded themselves that men were the strong ones?
Gloria let out another deep, guttural sound. Jones remembered something Aspen had once told him and tried suggesting Gloria should relax her jaw; she swore at him so colorfully he found himself genuinely slightly offended for a moment.
“That’s amazing,” Aspen was telling Gloria, who had begun to growl. “You’re doing it! Listen to your body. Your baby’s coming, Gloria, this is it.”
“Not here,” Gloria panted.
“Here,” Aspen said firmly. “Definitely here. I’ve got you, Gloria. I’m really good at this, OK? And I’m telling you, you’re almost there.”
The next few minutes were a primal blur, and some of the strangest moments of Jones’s life.
Soon, Aspen was calling his name—perfectly calm, with a streak of blood on her cheek like war paint—and handing him his coat, now soaked and stained.
Gloria’s baby was pressed to her mother’s chest, screaming and pink beneath the blood, and Gloria’s face was beatific.
Jones himself felt fundamentally changed.
As though he’d just seen some sort of religious miracle, perhaps, or a supernatural occurrence.
The ambulance was five minutes away, much to the Uber driver’s profound relief.
Aspen had climbed in beside Gloria now and smoothed the woman’s hair back from her face as Gloria shifted her top, bringing the baby beneath it to keep her warm.
Her little eyes were scrunched closed, her tiny hands balled in fists.
Jones leaned on the car door, looking down at them all.
It seemed almost impossible that this miniature creature would eventually grow into a person, with opinions and habits all her own.
“Isn’t she beautiful?” Aspen whispered.
Jones nodded, awed. “That was amazing.”
“Right?” Aspen said, beaming at him.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her smile that way. Something fluttered inside him. He did love Aspen, he did. Perhaps he simply couldn’t fall in love the way he had once—perhaps when your heart had been broken that badly, it was never quite the same again.
“You were amazing,” he told her. “We’re sacking off Shakespeare, right? Shall we go to the pub instead? You deserve a drink after that.”
Aspen’s smile dropped to something questioning. “It’s half past one. And I’m on shift later.”
“Right, right,” he said hurriedly. “Of course.”
His brain was like cotton wool. Gloria’s roars still seemed to be ringing in his ears, and his broken heart felt sorer than ever, for reasons he couldn’t quite name, but felt sure were to do with the baby.
He looked down at the child’s tiny, bloodstained feet.
She was the smallest person Jones had ever seen.
Jones pressed his hand to his chest. What was it he was feeling? Whatever it was, it was big, and he didn’t understand it at all.