7. Christine
— ? —
Christine
The pain wakes me from a dead sleep.
Not the dull ache I’ve grown used to - the constant pressure in my lower back, the heaviness that makes every movement feel like wading through water. This is different. Sharp. A tightening across my entire abdomen that steals my breath and leaves me gasping in the darkness.
I lie very still, waiting for it to pass. Braxton Hicks again, probably. The doctor said they’d get more intense as my due date approached. Nothing to worry about.
It passes.
I breathe.
And then it comes again.
Harder this time. A wave of pressure that builds and builds until I’m gripping the sheets with white-knuckled fingers, biting down on my lip to keep from crying out. My whole body contracts around the pain, muscles I didn’t know I had squeezing tight, and I think: this is different. This is real.
The clock on the nightstand glows in the darkness. I don’t look at it. I don’t want to know what time it is, don’t want to measure the intervals between contractions, don’t want to confirm what my body is already telling me.
It’s too early.
The baby isn’t supposed to come yet.
But she’s coming anyway.
I reach for my phone with trembling hands, already pulling up Benedict’s number. The screen is too bright in the darkness, and I squint against it as I press call.
It rings.
And rings.
And rings.
Hi, you’ve reached Benedict Morgan. I’m unavailable at the moment-
I hang up and call again.
Voicemail.
Again.
Voicemail.
The fourth time I don’t wait for the greeting. I hang up and watch the screen go dark in my hand, and the word that surfaces is the one that has been the shape of my entire marriage.
Later.
Everything with him is later.
Another contraction hits, and this time I can’t hold back the sound - a low moan that escapes through clenched teeth, animal and desperate.
The pain radiates through my entire body, and I curl around my belly like I can protect our daughter from what’s happening, from what’s about to happen, from all the ways this night is going to change everything.
I call his assistant next. Some part of me registers that it’s the middle of the night and she’s probably asleep, but I don’t care. I don’t have room to care about anything except the pain and the baby and the terrifying reality that I’m alone.
“Mrs. Morgan?” Her voice is groggy, confused. “Is everything all right?”
“I need Benedict.” My voice comes out strange - high and tight, threaded with panic I can’t control. “The baby is coming. I need him to call me back.”
“He’s in a meeting with the Budapest investors. I can have him call you when-”
“Now.” The word tears out of me, sharp and desperate. “Tell him to call me now. Please.”
“I’m sending the emergency straight to Ms. Hartley,” she says, and I can hear her typing. “She’s in the room with him. The second she acknowledges it she’ll put him on the phone. I’ll try the hotel as well.”
“Ms. Hartley,” I repeat.
“She handles his communications when he travels.” A pause, and something careful comes into her voice, something she probably shouldn’t be saying out loud. “She’s the only one with access to him right now.”
She hangs up.
I wait.
The phone stays silent.
Then, at some point - I don’t know when, the hours have stopped meaning anything - my phone lights up.
It’s his assistant again.
Mr. Morgan is aware and will call as soon as he can. He asks that you rest.
He asks that you rest.
I read it through a contraction that takes the whole room away from me, and when I can see again the words are still sitting there, and they are the five cruelest words anyone has ever sent me.
He knows. He knows and he isn’t coming, and he has sent a stranger to tell me to lie down quietly about it.
I don’t answer. There’s nothing to say to a man who already knows.
Another contraction - longer this time, the pressure building to something unbearable before finally, finally releasing.
I’m panting in the aftermath, sweat beading on my forehead, and I realize with a kind of distant horror that this is really happening.
I’m going into labor, alone, in a penthouse that’s never felt emptier.
I think about calling my mother. She would come - would drop everything and fly back from Canada, would hold my hand and tell me I’m strong, would be here in all the ways that matter.
But Canada is hours away. The baby is coming now.
I think about friends. Old colleagues from my event planning days, women I used to have brunch with and share secrets with and call in emergencies.
I gave them up. Slowly, gradually, one by one. For him. For his schedule, his events, his life that didn’t have room for the people I loved.
I have no one to call.
The realization settles over me like ice water, and for a moment the fear is worse than the pain.
I am utterly, completely alone. My husband is on another continent, unreachable.
My mother is thousands of miles away. And I have systematically dismantled every other relationship that might have sustained me through this moment.
This is what I traded for the penthouse. For the designer dresses and the Tiffany boxes and the life that looked so perfect from the outside.
This emptiness.
This silence.
I call 911.
The paramedics arrive quickly - I give them that. They’re kind, professional, their voices calm and steady as they help me onto a stretcher and into the elevator and through the lobby where the night doorman watches with wide eyes.
“Is there someone we can call?” one of them asks. “The baby’s father?”
I almost laugh.
“He’s unavailable.”
They exchange a look - pity, probably, or judgment - but they don’t push. They load me into the ambulance and ask me about my birth plan, my doctor, my hospital preference.
I had a plan. A beautiful plan. The presidential suite at Manhattan Presbyterian, with its private rooms and gourmet meals and concierge service. Benedict had arranged it months ago, back when he still attended appointments, still cared about the details of bringing our daughter into the world.
“I need authorization,” the admitting nurse tells me when we arrive. Her voice is apologetic but firm. “For the presidential suite. Your husband needs to-”
“He’s not answering his phone.”
“I understand, but the suite requires-”
“I don’t care about the suite.” The words come out sharper than I intended, edged with pain and exhaustion and something that might be hysteria. “Put me wherever. Just - please. The baby is coming.”
They put me in a regular room. Standard issue. Industrial lighting and thin blankets and a TV mounted on the wall that no one turns on. It’s fine. It’s more than fine - there’s a bed and monitors and people who know what they’re doing, and right now that’s all that matters.
There’s another woman behind the curtain. I hear her before I understand her, a low working sound, the same sound I’ve been making. And underneath it, a man’s voice. Steady and close. You’re okay. I’ve got you. Breathe with me, sweetheart, breathe with me.
Eight feet of hospital curtain. It might as well be an ocean.
The contractions come faster now. Closer together. Each one washes over me like a wave, dragging me under until I’m sure I’ll drown, then releasing me just long enough to gasp for air before the next one hits.
I text Benedict: BABY COMING. NOW.
Nothing.
I call again. Voicemail.
I try his assistant one more time, and she tells me in that professionally sympathetic voice that Mr. Morgan is still in meetings but she’s doing everything she can to reach him.
Everything she can isn’t enough.
The hours blur together. Pain and pressure and nurses checking my progress with clinical efficiency. Eight centimeters, they tell me. Nine. Almost there.
Almost there, and he’s not here.
I think about all the ways I imagined this moment.
Benedict holding my hand, his fingers intertwined with mine, telling me I’m brave and strong and beautiful.
His voice in my ear as I pushed, coaching me through the hardest work of my life.
The look on his face when he saw our daughter for the first time - wonder and terror and love so fierce it hurt to witness.
None of that is happening.
Instead, there’s a nurse named Maria who holds my hand because there’s no one else to do it. Her grip is firm and steady, and she tells me I’m doing great even though we both know she does this every day for strangers who have no one.
“You’re so strong,” she says during a brief lull between contractions. “I know this isn’t what you planned. But you’re doing it. You’re bringing your baby into the world.”
I want to tell her that strong isn’t how I feel. I feel broken. Abandoned. Like every fear I’ve ever had about my marriage is crystallizing into terrible truth in this sterile room.
But there’s no time for that, because another contraction is building, and the doctor is telling me to push.
I push, scream and push again.
And again.
And again.
I lose track of time. Lose track of everything except the primal, overwhelming need to get this baby out, to bring her into a world that suddenly feels far more brutal than I ever imagined.
The pain is everything - it consumes me, reshapes me, strips away every pretense until I’m just a body doing what bodies have done for millennia.
“One more push,” the doctor says. “You’re almost there.”
I push with everything I have left. Every ounce of strength, every shred of will, every desperate hope for the daughter I haven’t met yet.
And then-
A cry.
Small and fierce and furious, filling the room with the unmistakable sound of new life.
“It’s a girl,” someone says, but I already knew that.
They place her on my chest - this tiny, squalling, perfect creature who has my nose and his eyes and a cry that sounds like fury at a world that dared to summon her before she was ready.
Isabella.
We picked the name together. One of the last things we did together.
He promised he’d be here when she arrived.
He promised a lot of things.
“Hi, baby,” I whisper through tears I didn’t know I was crying. “Hi, sweetheart. I’m your mama.”
She quiets at my voice. Her eyes - dark like his, so dark they’re almost black - find my face, and I swear she sees me. Really sees me. Not the disappointment, not the loneliness, not the broken pieces of a woman who used to be whole. Just me. Her mother. The person who will never, ever leave her.
“I’ve got you,” I tell her. “I’ve got you, and I’m never letting go.”
The nurses are doing things around us - cleaning, checking, preparing - but I barely notice. My whole world has narrowed to this: the weight of my daughter on my chest, the sound of her breathing, the impossible miracle of her existence.
Then something changes in the room.
It’s the tempo I notice first. The nurses stop narrating and start moving. A second doctor comes through the door without anyone calling for her. Someone says a number I don’t catch and someone else says it back, louder.
“You’re bleeding more than we’d like,” the doctor says, and her voice is so calm it terrifies me. “We’re going to give you something, and I need you to stay very still for me.”
Hands press down on my stomach, hard enough that I cry out. Isabella is lifted off my chest and I hear myself say no, no, and someone says she’s right here, she’s right here, and the ceiling lights smear into long white streaks.
I think, with a clarity that feels almost clerical: I could die in this room. My daughter is eleven minutes old and I could die in this room and he wouldn’t find out for hours, and somebody else would have to tell him.
I don’t die.
It takes forty minutes, two bags of something, and a needle taped into the back of my hand. Then the room slows down again and they put her back on my chest, and a nurse starts stitching me up like none of it happened.
I did this.
Without him.
Maria held my hand, and she told me I was brave, and she meant every word of it. But she was a stranger doing a kindness on a Tuesday. Behind the curtain, a man I will never meet was counting breaths with his wife. And the person who promised to count them with me was somewhere I couldn’t reach.
And I survived.
Something shifts in my chest. Not just love - though that’s there too, overwhelming and terrifying and more fierce than anything I’ve ever felt. But something else. Harder. Colder.
Resolution.
I can do this. I can do anything. I can be everything this baby needs, with or without the man who was supposed to be here.
The nurse - Maria, the one who held my hand - appears with a soft smile. “Would you like me to take a picture? For the father?”
For the father.
I look at her. At the phone she’s offering. At the concerned tilt of her head, like she knows something is wrong but doesn’t want to ask.
I think about texting him a photo. A peace offering, proof that our daughter exists, an invitation to be part of this moment even from thousands of miles away.
Then I open Instagram instead.
I don’t know why. Muscle memory, maybe. Or the masochistic need to see what he’s doing while I was screaming his name in an empty room.
The first post I see is from Pauline Hartley.
A restaurant. White tablecloths and candlelight. Two champagne glasses clinking in the foreground.
“Celebrating closing the biggest deal of the year with this one! ??”
His hand is on her back. The same pose as the paparazzi photo. The same casual intimacy that makes my stomach turn.
She’s looking at him like he’s hers.
The timestamp: thirty minutes ago.
Thirty minutes ago, while the doctors were stitching me back together and the nurses were weighing our daughter and I was lying alone in a hospital bed trying not to shatter - he was clinking champagne glasses with another woman.
My hands are shaking too hard, and Isabella is stirring against my chest, and somewhere deep inside me, something that used to be hope cracks into a thousand irreparable pieces.
He wasn’t unreachable.
He was celebrating.
I pull my daughter closer and close my eyes, and I let the last fragile thread of my marriage snap.