Chapter Three
“COME ON, MACY, ONE MORE PUSH.”
Sweat beaded along her hairline, her fingers curled around the bedrails in a white-knuckled grip. The fetal monitor kept up its steady rhythm beside us, the whoosh of the baby’s heartbeat filling the room like background music.
Her partner hovered at her side, pale and wide-eyed, whispering encouragement that came out more like prayers. Betsy, my favorite nurse, dabbed Macy’s forehead with a cool cloth, and another—Anthony—stood ready with instruments gleaming under the harsh hospital room lights.
I shifted my gaze, watching the progress. “That’s it, Macy. You’re crowning. You’re almost there.”
She bore down again, a raw scream pulling from somewhere deeper than her lungs, and then, in a rush of movement that never failed to steal my breath, her baby slid into my hands, warm, slippery and alive.
A girl.
The first cry split the air. I guided her onto Macy’s chest, her tiny body instinctively finding her mother’s warmth. Macy wept, joy and exhaustion braided together on her tear-streaked face, as she whispered, “My baby, my baby girl.”
I smiled, but there was a familiar pinch in my chest, a fleeting pang that burned before I could shove it away.
The way Macy looked at her daughter—as though nothing else in the world mattered, as though every bruising kick and painful contraction had been worth this one small miracle—made me wonder: had my own mother looked at me like that once?
Just for a second? Or had she already been cataloguing the ways I would disappoint her?
It was easier not to dwell on the answer.
Macy’s partner looked up at me, eyes shining, like I’d just handed them the entire world wrapped in a pink, wriggling package. “Thank you,” he said, his voice breaking. Macy echoed it, softer, half-buried in her daughter’s hair.
I tugged at my gloves. “You did all the work.”
Still, as I stepped back, I felt the faintest echo of warmth trailing after me, like sunlight catching on my shoulders. It was the part of the job I could never quite put into words: that little residue of awe, clinging long after the baby’s first cry had faded into coos.
But awe couldn’t write charts.
I stripped off my gown and headed straight for the nurses’ station, already tapping into the electronic medical records.
My fingers flew across the keyboard, documenting vitals, Apgar scores, estimated blood loss—facts and numbers and tidy sentences that could never capture the thunderclap of a birth.
My gaze flicked to the clock above the desk.
One hour to finish this, drive across town, and somehow transform myself into someone who didn’t smell faintly of amniotic fluid before dinner with both of our families.
No pressure.
By the time I pushed through the glass doors of the practice I worked at—Mountain View Obstetrics it was the accumulation of every life I’d touched, every baby I’d held and guided into the world.
I had to compress it all, fold it neatly like origami, like I did with my gloves before every surgery, and present the version of me that would survive a night of polite smiles, probing questions, and carefully measured appearances.
Kevin knocked on the door, and I could hear his familiar, slightly overzealous energy even through the thin wood. “Um...you ready?”
“Almost,” I said, tugging the dress over my head. “Just giving myself a pep talk. And by pep talk, I mean staring at myself until I either feel confident or insane. We’ll see which one wins.”
“You’re going to look amazing,” he assured me. “Not that you don’t every day, but you know...”
I rolled my eyes, smiling despite myself. “Kevin, I appreciate the reassurance. I just wish my pep talk included instructions for surviving dinner with a man whose family probably has a six-step interrogation planned.”
“You’ve survived worse. Remember the postpartum shift last month when the power went out, and you delivered twins in candlelight?”
I laughed, shaking my head. “Candlelight twins. Somehow, this feels...different. More like a performance where everyone’s judging the smallest misstep.”
After securing the corner of my hijab with a magnet and sliding into my flats, I paused to study myself one last time.
This was it—the final battle in the thirty-year war—and instead of going out guns-blazing as my unapologetic, chronically chaotic self, I wanted a different kind of bang.
I wanted to look poised, polished, perfect, everything my mother had spent my entire childhood trying to sculpt me into, while simultaneously implying I didn’t have the innate biology to pull it off.
Despite the straight A’s, the awards, the medical degree, there had always been this...undertone in her voice: Nice, sweet, quiet girls get chosen. You? Try harder.
And for once, I wanted to show her that I could be that girl.
I’d always been capable of it—effortlessly, even.
I just never wanted to be. I wanted my last act of rebellion to look suspiciously like compliance.
A performance so squeaky clean she’d never guess the subtext: You don’t hold the puppet strings. I do.
Yeah, I was doing this to get away from her—to escape the house that was never a home, the bedroom that was never mine, the people that never wanted me—but she didn’t get to call the shots anymore.
Every tilt of my head, every premeditated smile, every subtle gesture had been rehearsed in my mind a thousand times.
I was primed for the spotlight, impeccably aware that this composure was mine and mine alone, even if it existed for a family I barely knew and for a love story that was completely fake.
Tonight, for the first time, the curated version of me wasn’t for her at all. It was for me.
Maybe I’d never know what real love felt like—the kind Sarah believed in with her whole chest, the kind that made you plan white dresses and hunky husbands and bundles of joy.
Maybe I was destined to keep wearing the crown my mother placed on my head at birth, the one labeled disappointment, pinned so neatly I sometimes forgot it wasn’t part of my skull.
Maybe I’d always carry her around with me like a ringtone with no snooze button—failure, failure, failure.
But at least, I told myself, there would be proof. Something I could point to, something that said: See? I followed your script. I chose what you would’ve chosen. I bent myself into the shape you kept insisting was right.
And under that, under the pretending and the performing, was the subtler, truer wish: that if sacrificing romance, if dipping my reluctant toe into the so-called dating pool under the banner of marriage, if playing her game long enough, if doing the one thing she wanted badly enough—then maybe I’d finally get to walk off the board.
Maybe this would buy me an exit. A little distance.
A version of my life that didn’t orbit her.
And if that was all I ever got out of this—if the only prize was the slow, aching promise of freedom—then I’d take it, even if it never once felt like winning.