Chapter 13
Everything is fine.
This is normal.
Addison won’t assume the worst when there’s not a damn thing she can do about it either way. At least that’s what she tells herself in between cramps until the pain gets too awful to bear. Then, she allows all those fears she refused to entertain creep to the forefront of her mind again.
Wyatt hurls questions at her as if she has answers, but she’s too busy writhing to give them much thought.
He doesn’t hesitate to scoop Addison off the floor. The fact that she has no energy to protest is telling in itself.
After he’s deposited her onto his bed, she reaches for him.
It’s a habit to deal with pain alone. Ignore it, fix herself up, pretend it’s not happening.
Anything to avoid showing weakness. This time, she only wants to be closer to him.
He’s safety and security all wrapped up in the same package, the only person she wants by her side when she’s hurting.
“Tell me what’s happening?” he says, dipping the bed with his weight. “Did you hurt like this with Emma? You said you had cramps then, too. Did you see someone for it then?”
She frowns, trying to call up those memories. “To be honest, I can’t remember if it was this bad or not. The only medical care I had was from the midwives, which is fine for a birth and less fine for complications prior. It was the only care the community believed in.”
“And it’s too soon to have felt the baby move at all yet?”
She nods with a sniffle. This baby is so new that it’s barely there at all.
She’s had nightmares about this more than once. Kept telling herself it’s an overactive imagination and stress combined to form a rolling snowball of anxiety, but now it’s hard to ignore.
They have few options, and that reality has her latching onto the only thing they can do. “You have to get the ultrasound machine.”
He shakes his head, horrified at her request. “I can’t leave you like this. What would we even do with the information we get from it? What you need is a real doctor.”
She grips his arm in a tight squeeze as another cramp rolls through her. “Please. It’s not far. I need to see. It might not be too soon for a heartbeat.”
It isn’t the most rational thing she’s ever asked for, but at the moment, it’s the only thing she can latch onto.
The hope of a doctor is slim.
The machine is right there.
He’s as torn as she’s ever seen him, and she expects he’ll protest again and make her beg, but he surprises her with a solemn nod of agreement.
“Take Emma with you?”
He doesn’t fight her on that even once, and she knows why.
If something happens while he’s gone, then Emma would be here to deal with it alone.
If she’s being honest with herself, then sending them on this quest might have more than one motivation, the most important being to keep her daughter from watching her die, or watching her miscarry, should it come to that.
She’s caught between the agony of not knowing and the terror of being separated from them both when the future is so uncertain.
“No! I wanna stay here,” Emma cries.
“Listen to me, you have to go with him.” She waves her daughter over. “I need you to trust me on this, okay? You’ll be back before you know it.”
She’s not convinced, and Addison begins to doubt herself. Shouldn’t she want to spend every moment she can with the people she cares about? Why is she pushing them both away? Then her stomach rolls again, and the need to hear the baby’s heartbeat overcomes her like a tidal wave.
“He doesn’t need me, but if I stay here, I can help. Please don’t make me go,” Emma says softly.
“I do need you,” Wyatt cuts in. “You’re smaller than me. What if we gotta get in some tight places for that machine?”
He’s trying his best with a flimsy reason.
Addison gives Emma a forced smile. “You’re so brave. I know you can do this. You’re safe with Wyatt, and I’ll be right here when you get back. Now go.”
She’s trusting him with the most precious thing she has. Sending her child out into this broken world by his side.
“We won’t be long.” He rushes in to press his lips to her forehead, whispering softly against her skin in a sudden first kiss that feels like a moment stolen from then instead of gifted.
It’s not until they’re gone that fear overtakes her for other reasons.
She doesn’t want to be alone. Nausea stirs in her gut, and her hands tremble as she races through a long line of worst-case scenarios.
It’ll take less than an hour for them to grab the ultrasound machine and come back.
If she were going to die in an hour, she’d already be worse off than she is. An hour is nothing.
She can do this. She has to.
There’s a stack of books on Wyatt’s side table already.
One of the corners turned down to mark his spot in what looks like an instruction manual for home births.
She props herself up against the headboard, reaching for it to see what’s inside.
A series of photos of a baby making its way down the birth canal hits her in the face like a punch. She almost flings it across the room.
“Not a chance I’m reading that right now,” she mumbles.
It’s a stark reminder of how terrified she is to experience labor for the first time. She never felt any contractions with Emma. The C-section drugs kept her pain-free. Never had to handle something the size of a small watermelon leaving her body the old-fashioned way.
How Wyatt can look at any of those books and not be utterly petrified is a mystery.
Vincent refused to even talk about it. He told her that he’d be out looking for supplies when she went into labor, and she had better be finished by the time he got back.
That was the end of their preparation. If she’s honest, she was glad he had no desire to be there.
He hadn’t stayed for Emma’s birth either.
Never visited her at the hospital or sat by her bed to hold her hand.
Men were never part of the process back in the community.
It was the women who all huddled together to help each other through, with the husbands only showing up after the gore and suffering had come to an end.
Wyatt absorbs it all like a sponge, though. He’s unbothered by anything she might find gruesome herself and ready to be a fountain of birthing knowledge when the time comes.
It’s strange, she thinks with a sad shake of her head, how badly Addison wants to include him.
Now, they only have to make it that far.
“Women have babies all the time. Every day,” she tells herself. “Well, they used to.”
Another wave has her wishing for a distraction, but she refuses to do the one thing she has avoided since finding out she’s pregnant.
She will not talk to this baby.
She won’t cradle her belly in her hands and whisper secrets to something she fears she won’t get to keep.
Even before these cramps started to pose their own problem, she had been worried about how this would end.
The apocalypse is no place for a newborn.
She has only been foolish to think they might beat the odds.
Reluctantly, she pokes at her stomach as she breaks one of her most important self-imposed rules. “I promise to stop pretending you’re not in there if you make it through this.”
She has wished more than once that the timing were different, that the situation were different, that the father had been different, that this baby didn’t exist yet. Now she’d give anything to take that back.
By the time the sun comes up hours later, long after Wyatt and Emma should have returned already, the pain is gone, the jack hammering of her pulse has calmed, and her body has finally begun to relax…once the steady stream of blood finally stops soaking the sheets.