Chapter 9
Audrey
"Audrey. Oh my God. Are you okay? Easton just called me."
"I'm okay," I said. "We're both okay. She's here, Astrid."
"She's here." Astrid's voice went thick. "Oh my God, Aud."
"She's perfect. She's sleeping right next to me."
Astrid was crying. I could hear it through the phone—the wet, shaky breathing of a woman who had been carrying this with me for nine months and had just found out it was over and everyone was alive. "I was so scared. He said you were on Route 9. He said you were alone in the car."
"I'm okay. I promise. We're both okay."
"You had her on the side of a highway."
"I had her in the back of a medic unit. Slight upgrade."
Astrid laughed through the crying. "Don't make me laugh right now, I'm trying to be upset with you."
"Astrid, I'm sorry I didn't call. The contractions were right on top of each other. I couldn't even make it to the exit."
"Stop. Don't apologize to me. You called 911, and they came, and you're both fine. That's all that matters." She took a breath. I could hear her pulling it together, the practical Astrid coming back online under the tears. "I'm coming. What do you need?"
"You don't have to come tonight."
"I'm already getting my keys. What do you want me to bring?"
"The chicken from Rosario's."
"Done. I'll be there in less than an hour."
Maricel was at the monitor beside my bed, checking the readout, adjusting the IV line.
I knew her. I'd worked beside her for two years on the L&D floor, traded shifts with her, and eaten her leftovers out of the break room fridge when mine were sad.
She was good. Efficient without being cold, warm without making it about herself.
She wrote something on the chart without looking at me any differently than she looked at every patient who came through postpartum recovery.
I appreciated that more than I could say.
The bassinet was beside the bed. My daughter was in it, asleep, wrapped in the hospital blanket with the pink and blue stripes that I'd placed on a thousand newborns and never thought about from this side.
She was small. Her face was red and compressed from the delivery, her fists curled against the blanket, her mouth working in her sleep at something I couldn't see. She'd been alive for two hours.
I was in the bed. Hospital gown, hair pinned off my face with a clip Maricel found in the supply closet.
My body ached in places I understood clinically and was now understanding in a way that had nothing to do with clinical knowledge.
The epidural I didn't get was making itself known in every muscle from my hips to my knees.
My arms were heavy. My hands were shaking, and I couldn't make them stop.
I'd delivered on the shoulder of Route 9. In the back of a medic unit. With Duke Rhodes's hands catching my daughter.
I wasn’t going to think about that yet.
I set the phone on the bed.
Maricel was at the whiteboard by the door, finishing the bassinet card. She'd been moving through the room the whole time I was on the phone, quiet and steady, the postpartum checklist, the labeling, and the small adjustments that I'd done for a thousand women and that someone was now doing for me.
Maricel capped her pen. She adjusted the bassinet half an inch closer to the bed without being asked and stood at the foot of the bed with the chart at her hip and the professional composure I recognized because I wore it every shift.
"Vitals are stable," she said. "Bleeding's within range. I'll be back in thirty to check again."
“Thanks, Maricel.”
She paused. "There's a firefighter outside. He says he's the father. He's been in the waiting room for a while."
Her voice was even.
He'd been in the waiting room for a while.
I heard the words and tried to make them fit the story I'd been carrying for nine months. He was supposed to leave. He was supposed to go back to the firehouse, file the call, and drive home. He wasn't supposed to sit in a hospital waiting room.
"He can come in," I said.
She nodded. She left.
I'd spent nine months building speeches in my head, and none of them started with me in a hospital bed two hours after giving birth on a state highway with my hands still shaking.
A knock.
"Can I come in?"
Duke's voice through the door. Quieter than I expected.
"Yeah."
The door opened. He came in.
He was still in his uniform. His sleeves were pushed to his elbows. His hands were in his pockets. He walked to the foot of the bed and stopped.
He looked at me.
The quiet between us ran long. I could hear the monitor, the ventilation, the muffled sounds of the floor outside.
Then he said it.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
I had the line ready. I'd been writing it in my head for nine months, revising it, stripping it down until it was clean and weightless. A sentence I could hand him without handing him anything underneath it.
"Keeping the baby was my choice," I said. "You don't have to be responsible for her. I'm not asking you for anything."
He looked at the floor. His hand came up to the back of his neck, and he held it there for a beat, gripping the muscle, like the words he wanted were caught somewhere between his throat and his mouth, and he was trying to work them loose.
"That's not why I'm asking," he said.
"Then what are you asking?"
A moment passed. The hand came down from his neck, and he looked at me.
The charm was gone. The grin, the deflection, the room-reading posture I'd catalogued for three months of wedding planning.
None of it was on his face. What was on his face was a man standing in a hospital room trying to say something true, and the truth was harder for him than anything I'd watched him do in the months I'd known him.
"I would have wanted to know," he said.
"We had an agreement."
"Fuck the agreement. This wasn't part of it." His voice didn't rise. It got quieter, which was worse. "I would have wanted to know that you were carrying my child."
My child.
The words landed in my chest and stayed.
Nine months I'd carried this alone, and in nine months, I'd built a version of Duke Rhodes who would hear the news and step back.
Who would say something kind and noncommittal and leave.
That was the version I planned for. That was the version I didn't tell, because not telling him meant I never had to watch him choose the door.
The man at the foot of my bed was not that version. The man at the foot of my bed had said my child like the words cost him something, and he was still standing there, and I didn't know what to do with a version of Duke Rhodes I hadn't built a wall for.
"What are we doing here, Duke?"
"I'm asking you to let me be a part of this child's life."
I looked at him. He was still at the foot of the bed. He hadn't come closer. He hadn't moved toward the bassinet, toward me, or toward anything that would let him claim more space in this room than I was willing to give him. He was standing where he stood and asking.
Duke Rhodes was not a man who stayed. He was the man this town knew as charming, fun, light on his feet, lighter with his goodbyes.
I'd heard his name in the same sentence as half a dozen women in three years, none of whom lasted past a season.
He was Tuesday nights, easy weekends, and the goodbye at the end of it.
My daughter was not going to be the thing he tried because it seemed like the right thing to do, and then walked away from when the trying got hard.
"I don't know, Duke." I met his eyes. "Are you ready to be a father?"
He went still. The question landed, and I watched it hit him. He didn't reach for the grin or the deflection. He stood there with his hands at his sides.
"I'm not," he said.
I nodded. I believed him. That was the problem.
He looked at the floor. His jaw worked. He looked at the bassinet for the first time since he walked in, and I saw his eyes go to the small shape under the striped blanket. Whatever crossed his face, he didn't try to manage it.
Then "Still," he said, "you have to at least give me a chance to try."
I felt the pull. Low in my chest, the same pull I felt every time someone said the right thing at the wrong moment, the pull that made me want to believe that a man who admitted he wasn't ready and asked to try anyway was a man worth trusting.
I wanted to believe it. I wanted to say yes.
I wanted to hand him the chair and watch him sit down and stay.
But I'd watched my mother want that. For years.
The line came out before I had time to soften it.
"She's not going to grow up wondering why someone who said he'd try stopped trying."
His face changed. The openness stayed, but something behind it flinched, and I knew the words had landed where I'd aimed them and also somewhere I hadn't.
"Raising a child isn't a Tuesday date that you never see again, Duke."
I watched it hit. I watched his mouth close. I watched his shoulders take the weight of what I'd just said, and I saw him decide not to argue.
"I don't have an answer for you right now," I said. "Can you give me time to think about it?"
The quiet ran long. His eyes went to the bassinet one more time. I saw what was on his face. I made myself look at it without letting it change anything, because if I let it change something, I was going to ask him to stay, and asking him to stay was the thing I couldn't do.
He exhaled. Long, slow, through his nose.
"Fine," he said.
He turned, walked to the door, and put his hand on the handle.
When he opened it, Astrid was there.
She was in the hallway with a bag from Rosario's in one hand and her car keys in the other.
She looked at Duke, and her face lit with something that was relief and warmth and the uncomplicated gladness of a woman who had been carrying a secret for nine months and was seeing the two people at the center of it in the same room.
"Duke." She said his name like a door opening. "Oh, that's good. You've met your daughter."
Duke looked at her. His face held for a second, everything he'd just been carrying visible on it for anyone who knew how to read him, and then it smoothed over.
"Yeah," he said. "I just need to get some air."
He went past her. His boots were quiet on the linoleum. Astrid stood in the doorway and watched him go. I saw the moment she understood that the air he needed was not the kind you get from a hallway.
She turned to me with the Rosario's bag and a smile that was ready to celebrate. Then she saw my face.
She didn't ask.
She set the bag from Rosario's on the chair by the window, crossed the room, and put her arms around me.
I put my face against her shoulder. She held on, and I let her.