30. Nora
— ? —
Nora
The storm rolled in around midnight.
I woke to the sound of thunder cracking across the sky, close enough that the windows rattled in their frames. Rain hammered against the roof, a downpour that turned dirt roads to rivers and made the creek behind the pasture swell to twice its size.
Hunt was already awake beside me, his hand on my belly where our daughter had been restless all night.
“That’s a bad one,” he said.
“The weather channel said it’d miss us.”
“The weather channel lied.”
Lightning lit up the bedroom, turning everything white for a heartbeat. The thunder that followed was immediate, a boom that I felt in my chest.
I shifted against the pillows, trying to find a comfortable position. At nine months pregnant, comfortable positions had become largely theoretical. My back ached. My hips ached. Everything ached.
“Go back to sleep,” I said. “There’s nothing we can do about the weather.”
“I wasn’t planning to do anything about the weather.” His hand made slow circles on my belly. “I was planning to lie here and worry about you.”
“You’ll wear yourself out.”
“It’s happening anyway.”
Another crack of lightning. Another roll of thunder. The baby kicked against Hunt’s palm, hard enough that I gasped.
“She’s awake,” he observed.
“She’s been awake all night. I think she’s training for a marathon in there.”
“She takes after her mother.” I felt him smile against my hair.
“Her mother doesn’t run marathons.”
“Her mother works eighteen-hour days and calls it normal.”
“Work is different.”
“It’s not different.” He kissed my shoulder. “Try to rest. I’ll check on the animals at dawn.”
I closed my eyes.
The first contraction hit twenty minutes later.
It started low in my back, a pressure that built and spread and wrapped around my belly. I’d felt Braxton-Hicks for weeks, the practice contractions that meant nothing, but this was different. This was real.
“Hunt.”
He was beside me instantly. “What’s wrong?”
“I think.” The contraction peaked, stealing my breath. “I think the baby’s coming.”
The world became very focused after that.
Hunt helped me out of bed, his hands steady even though I could feel the tension vibrating through him. He helped me dress in a loose shirt, helped me into the hallway, helped me to the bathroom when I insisted I needed to pee before we drove anywhere.
“We should call the hospital,” he said through the door.
“I’m calling.” The contraction eased enough for me to think. I dialed the number, waited through the rings, got the night nurse. “This is Dr. Lenora Smith. I’m at thirty-nine weeks and I’m having regular contractions.”
“How far apart?”
“About ten minutes. They just started.”
“Okay, Dr. Smith, we’ll get you checked in. How soon can you get here?”
Hunt’s voice from the hallway: “Nora. We have a problem.”
I opened the bathroom door.
He was standing at the window, his phone in his hand, his face illuminated by the glow of the screen.
“The bridge is out,” he said. “Flash flood warning across the county. Roads to the hospital are impassable.”
The next contraction hit.
I gripped the doorframe, breathing through it, trying to remember everything I knew about labor and delivery. Which was quite a lot, technically, but applied to horses and cattle and dogs. Not to myself.
“County hospital is forty minutes in good weather,” Hunt continued. “The alternative route is through the valley, but that road floods first in any storm.”
“What about airlift?”
“Grounded. No helicopters in this weather.”
The contraction released. I straightened up, met his eyes.
“Then we do this here.”
“Nora.”
“We’ve got the clinic, and supplies, and experience delivering hundreds of babies.” Another cramp started building. “They were animal babies, but the principle is the same.”
“The principle is not the same.”
“Same plumbing, bigger stakes.” I grabbed his arm and started walking toward the stairs. “Sterile environment, monitoring equipment, a controlled delivery. The biggest difference is that I can tell you what’s happening instead of you having to guess.”
“You’re not going to be in any condition to give instructions.”
“Watch me.”
We made it to the kitchen before the next contraction dropped me to my knees.
Hunt caught me, lowered me gently, held me through the worst of it. His hands were warm on my back, pressing into the spots where the pain radiated.
“Closer together,” I gasped.
“I noticed.”
“That’s faster than it should be.”
“I noticed that too.”
Waffles emerged from his corner of the kitchen, bleating with concern. He pressed his head against my shoulder, his yellow eyes examining me with the grave attention he apparently saved for medical emergencies.
“Not now,” I told the goat.
He bleated again, more insistently.
“I don’t need a goat midwife.”
Hunt was already on the phone. “June. We need you at the clinic. Nora’s in labor and the roads are flooded.” A pause. “No, we can’t wait. They’re coming fast.” Another pause. “Bring Doc Hale if he’s awake. And towels. And anything else you think we might need.”
He hung up and helped me to my feet.
“June’s five minutes away. Doc Hale is already up. They’ll meet us at the clinic.”
“The clinic’s five minutes into town. Main Street was still dry at midnight.”
“I’ll carry you to the truck.”
“You can’t carry me. I weigh a thousand pounds.”
“You weigh exactly what you should weigh.” He bent and lifted me, cradling me against his chest. “Hold on.”
The rain hit us the moment he opened the door.
It was coming down in sheets, turning the yard into a lake. Lightning cracked across the sky, illuminating the path to the truck in stuttering flashes. Hunt moved carefully, his boots squelching in the mud, his arms tight around me, and got me into the passenger seat one-handed.
A contraction started halfway into town.
I gripped the door handle and breathed through it, counting the seconds, trying not to tense against the pain. His hands didn’t leave the wheel. His voice didn’t stop.
“Almost there,” he said.
“I know.” I had my fists knotted in the seat belt.
“You’re doing amazing.”
“I haven’t done anything yet.”
He huffed a laugh, and I could hear how scared he was under all that calm. “You’re letting me drive without complaining. That’s amazing.”
“I’m saving my complaints for later.”
He carried me in from the truck and got the clinic door open somehow, one-handed. The familiar smell of antiseptic hit me, comforting in its ordinariness. This was my space. My practice. The place where I’d built a life out of the ruins of our marriage.
Now I was going to give birth in it.
There wasn’t time to wait for anyone.
I’d known it in the truck, in the way the contractions were stacking on top of each other, five minutes to four to three while Hunt drove through the flooded streets.
First babies are supposed to take their time.
Mine had apparently inherited her father’s habit of showing up early and her mother’s refusal to wait for backup.
“They’re too close,” I gasped, as Hunt laid me on the sheets he’d thrown over the exam table. “Hunt. She’s coming. She’s coming now.”
He didn’t panic.
This was what I’d married him for, the part I’d forgotten to look for under all that time with a man in a suit: the way Hunt Anderson went still and certain in the exact moment everyone else fell apart.
He’d already grabbed the go-bags from the truck, the ones he’d packed at month six and rechecked every week since, for contingencies, while I rolled my eyes.
He had gloves on. He had the kit open, the oxygen and the warmer and the clean towels laid out in a neat row, and he was moving through all of it fast and precise and in the right order.
Because he’d done exactly this a thousand times, in a thousand barns, at every hour of the night.
He’d brought hundreds of babies into the world.
Foals in the mud at two in the morning. Calves turned the wrong way.
Lambs, a whole spring’s worth of them, slick and steaming in the cold.
He’d knelt in a hundred barns with his arms slick to the shoulder and coaxed new life into the air, and never once let his hands shake.
They were shaking now.
“You’re okay,” I told him, which was a ridiculous thing to say to the person who was supposed to be helping me. “Hunt. Look at me. It’s just a delivery. You’ve done this more than anyone alive.”
“Not this one.” His voice cracked. “Never a human one. Never one that was mine.”
“Then this is the most important patient you’ll ever have. So do what you do.” Another contraction seized me and I bore down on his forearm hard enough to bruise. “Talk me through it. Back to back.”
The fight went out of his shoulders at that. The old words. The oldest promise.
“Back to back,” he said. “Okay. Okay, doc. Here’s what we’re going to do.”
And then my husband delivered our daughter.
He talked the whole time, low and steady, the voice he used on frightened animals and had apparently been saving for me, telling me what he saw and what he needed, when to push and when to breathe and when to stop and let my body do the work it already knew.
I pushed and swore and called him several names I’ll deny to my grave.
He took all of it without flinching, his shaking hands gone still the second there was a job in front of them, because that was Hunt: give him a title and he lost himself, give him a life to save and he became the best version of any man in the room.
“One more,” he said, and his voice broke on it. “One more, Nora, she’s here, she’s right here-”
I pushed.
The world split open.
And then there was crying, not mine, a new voice, small and furious and outraged at the whole cold bright world, and Hunt made a sound I’d never heard from him in seven years, a broken exhale that was half sob and half prayer, and he lifted our daughter onto my chest with hands that were, finally, allowed to shake.
“She’s here,” he whispered. “Nora. She’s here. You did it.”
“We did it.”
She was slippery and red and screaming, her fists waving, her hair dark and damp against my skin. When her eyes finally cracked open, unfocused and furious, they were the palest blue. Her father’s eyes.
“Hi,” I whispered. “Hi, baby girl.”
The clinic door banged open a while later.
It should’ve been five minutes. The flood had turned the road from the diner into a shallow river, and June came through the door soaked past the knees, Doc Hale right behind her, both of them carrying bags and towels and the frantic energy of people who had waded through a storm to help.
They stopped dead in the doorway.
There was nothing left to do.
The baby was on my chest, pinking up and howling. Hunt was cutting the cord with the steady precision of a surgeon, tears running unchecked down his filthy, exhausted face. The storm outside was already softening, thunder rolling off to bother some other county.
“Well,” Doc Hale said, his weathered voice thick. “Would you look at that.”
June just started to cry.
They made themselves useful the way good people do, June with warm blankets, Doc Hale checking the baby over with hands that had delivered four human babies in his younger days and remembered every one, and between them they pronounced us both perfect.
Best delivery he’d seen in forty years, Doc Hale said, even if it was on a table meant for horses. Especially because of that.
Waffles, who had climbed into the truck bed before Hunt could stop him and flatly refused to be left in the rain, watched the whole thing from a respectful distance by the door, his yellow eyes fixed on the newest member of the household with what looked like reverence.
“What’s her name?” June asked, wiping her eyes.
I looked at Hunt.
We’d made lists for months. Crossed things out. Started over. But there’d only ever been one name that felt like the truth.
“Ellie,” I said. “After my grandmother.”
“Ellie Grace Anderson.” Hunt’s voice cracked clean in half on it. He touched her tiny hand, and her fingers closed around his, and he made that broken sound again. “Ellie Grace.”
Later, after the roads had drained enough for the hospital to send someone, after we’d both been checked and declared healthy, after June had finally stopped crying and started organizing, the three of us lay together in the recovery cot that was really only built for one.
Ellie was asleep on my chest. Hunt was curled around us both, careful and fierce, his hand spread over her impossibly small back. He leaned down and put his mouth close to her ear, close enough that only the two of us could hear.
“Here’s the deal,” he whispered to our hour-old daughter. “The only deal I’m ever going to make with you. Back to back. Always. You don’t go down without me beside you, and I don’t go down without you.” His voice was wrecked. “That’s the vow. That’s all of it. Welcome to the family.”
Outside, the last of the storm blew itself out.
Two emergency vets and their daughter, born on a table meant for horses, in the place where her mother had rebuilt her life.
It was perfect.
It was ours.