Chapter 30 #2
“Fine,” I manage, the word rough. I smooth my thumb over the back of her hand, mapping tendons I’ve taped a hundred times on other people and never learned like this.
If the headlines were a person, I’d put them through the boards.
If the pressure had a throat, I’d close my hand around it until it understood what it did to her lungs.
Guilt gnaws like bad tape under a skate. I was built to carry weight and I still let it settle on her. The press room. The cameras. The way the city seems to think my life is their streaming service. I offered to sit. I’ll do more than sit. I’ll—
“You don’t get to make this your fault because it’s easier than admitting bodies are chaotic,” Riley says, as if she can read my thoughts off my face like a whiteboard.
“I can still hate the timing,” I say. “I can still hate that we had to walk through a hall of microphones to get to a room with a fetal monitor.”
“Both can be true,” she says, voice going trainer-flat in a way that soothes me more than any lullaby. Her fingers squeeze mine once. “But you don’t get to punish yourself as enrichment.”
I huff a laugh that’s more exhale than humor. “Since when did you become my therapist?”
“Since you started bargaining with God out loud,” she says. “He’s busy.”
A portable Doppler rolls past; somewhere beyond the curtain a baby’s heartbeat gallops, too fast and perfect, and I have to resist the urge to rip the wall down to see it. Our monitor answers with its own softer ocean. Practicing, the nurse said. A scare.
The tech returns with a paper cup and a labeled specimen cup.
“Sorry,” she says to Riley with a grimace that says she’s asked this a thousand times and hated it every one.
“If you can.” Riley nods, practical, and I help her sit, sliding the blood-pressure cuff cord out of the way, adjusting the belt so it doesn’t dig.
She moves carefully, grimacing once, eyes flaring and settling like a storm remembering it’s supposed to pass.
When she’s back on the bed, I tuck the blanket like a man learning how to fold corners. My hands don’t shake. I tell myself that’s growth and not just fatigue pretending to be courage.
“Jason,” she says after a minute, eyes on the ceiling tiles like she’s aligning herself with a grid. “Look at me.”
I do.
“I’m okay right now,” she says, and I realize she’s throwing me the same rope the nurse threw her. “Hold right now with me.”
So I hold it. I count the beeps until they turn into something like a rhythm I could skate to. I watch her breathing and breathe with her. I keep my feet planted inside this square of curtain, and I don’t lunge at the shadows outside it.
Scare, not catastrophe. I repeat it until my jaw stops aching.
Somewhere down the hall, a door opens. A familiar voice threads through the noise: “Riley? I’m Dr. Hassan—sorry for the wait.” Relief surges like clean ice under fresh blades.
I don’t let go of her hand.
A woman in navy scrubs parts the curtain with the practiced grace of someone who’s done it fifteen thousand times and still remembers every face.
Dr. Hassan. Her gaze goes to Riley first, then to the monitor, then to Riley again, weighting the human more than the numbers.
“Hi, Riley. I’ve got you,” she says, calm as an elevator that never jerks.
She sanitizes, checks the belt placement, presses two fingers lightly where the muscle jumps under Riley’s skin.
“I’m seeing intermittent tightening, not a rhythm yet.
We’ll keep you on, run fluids. We’re going to be conservative and careful. ”
My lungs release a millimeter. Conservative and careful I can do.
A shadow flickers at the edge of the curtain; the air shifts in that way it does when attention walks into a room uninvited. Dr. Hassan flicks a look toward the opening at the same moment I hear it—the soft, insectile click of a phone camera faking silence.
I pivot before I think. Outside our square of light, a man in a puffer vest pretends to be lost in the geography of triage and definitely is not. His phone lifts chest-level, lens barely peeking past the curtain seam. The angle is bad and deliberate. He wants blurry. Blurry sells rumor.
Something cold detonates behind my ribs. I take a step for the gap, every tendon up my forearms lighting like I’m about to drop gloves.
Security beats me there. A woman in a badge and a jacket that says PROTECT without shouting it steps into the man’s space like she grew the floor under him. “Sir,” she says, already reaching for the phone, “you can’t be here. This is patient care. Delete the photo.”
He tries a smirk that expects complicity. “Public figure,” he says, almost sing-song.
“Not in here,” she returns, and the velvet comes off her tone. “Now.”
He hesitates, still holding the phone, still showing me the half-reflection of my own face in the dark screen. I can see the next three minutes: me closing the distance, the phone snapping, the headline writing itself. Heat spikes up my neck and flares in my jaw.
A hand closes around my wrist. Small. Certain. Riley.
“Stay,” she says, not loud, not pleading. Command voice. “With me.”
The two words yank me back into the square of the curtain like a rope cut the right length. I let the heat flash and go. I turn my palm up under hers, let her fingers settle into the notch between mine like a key in a lock.
Security’s partner arrives, and between the two of them the puffer vest man loses his confidence.
There’s a quiet exchange—delete, verify, escorted back to the lobby with a warning about credentials he probably borrowed.
A nurse from two bays down mutters something that sounds like “people are feral” without looking up from an IV pump.
Dr. Hassan doesn’t waste the adrenaline spike; she turns it into action.
“We’re going to start fluids,” she says, already clicking the saline onto the IV pole the phlebotomist left behind.
“Sometimes stress is gasoline. We turn the engine off.” She glances at me, not unkind.
“You okay to be hands and calm while I’m hands and medicine? ”
“Yes,” I say, voice lower than my usual.
I fit my hip to the rail and frame my other hand over Riley’s where it rests on the blanket.
She exhales like someone added an inch to the room.
I track every movement Dr. Hassan makes like a penalty kill, not to second-guess—so I have a job that isn’t raging at the door.
Security pauses at the curtain on their sweep back and meets my eye. “We’ve got the hall,” the woman says. “You’ve got her.”
“I do,” I answer, and it feels like a promise to both of us.
Riley squeezes twice—I’m here—and I squeeze back the way she taught me, the way I’ve watched her teach rookies who thought toughness meant clenching their teeth. I know.
The saline drips. The monitor ticks. The ER’s noise recedes to a distant rink roar. In the space where the blurry angle tried to live, we draw a line and stand on it, together.
Dr. Hassan moves with the kind of economy that makes trust easy. She checks the drip, glances at the monitor readout, then rests two fingers along the inside of Riley’s wrist, counting beats I can feel under my palm too.
“Okay,” she says, voice a level plane. “Here’s where we are.
You’re having minor, irregular contractions—what we sometimes call uterine irritability.
No bleeding, cervix is closed, vitals are stable.
Your labs look reassuring. This reads as stress-induced and dehydration-assisted.
” She flicks a look at the saline. “We’re addressing both. ”
The word reassuring goes through me like warm water. I don’t realize I’ve been braced for a different sentence until my shoulders drop and my knees consider not holding. I lean into the rail instead.
Riley breathes out, something unspooling in the sound. “So not…not labor.”
“Not labor,” Dr. Hassan confirms. “Your body is telling us it needs a quieter lane for a bit.” She turns to me without turning Riley into scenery. “Both of you had a week that would melt steel. Adrenaline is useful on the ice; it’s less useful here.”
Adrenaline has been my second bloodstream since I was twelve. I nod like I understand because tonight I do. “What do you need from us?”
“Rest,” she says first, like it’s a prescription with dosage.
“Hydration. Fewer spikes—news, cameras, late-night strategizing. You can walk, you can work, but you set a ceiling and you honor it. If cramps return like this—hydration, heat, lying on your left side, then call me. If there’s any bleeding, fluid, a fever, or pain that patterns—straight back in.
” She meets Riley’s eyes. “You don’t try to be clever. You let us help.”
Riley nods, chastened and relieved in the same breath. “Yes, doctor.”
Dr. Hassan softens. “You’re doing well. Tonight was smart. You listened early.” She squeezes Riley’s shoulder, then mine with a professional’s brief, grounding pressure. “I’ll check back after you finish this bag. If all remains calm, I’ll send you home with instructions. Questions?”
I have a thousand. I ask the one that matters most. “Is the baby okay?” The word still feels new in my mouth—massive and fragile.
Her smile is small and real. “Right now? Yes.”
Right now. The two words that keep saving me.
When she steps out, the room regains its edges. Riley’s eyes find mine and hold. There’s gratitude in them and fear and the kind of strength I’ve tried to borrow since the first time she told me to sit the hell down and ice my wrist like I wasn’t special.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and hear the old habit in it—the one where I apologize for storms I didn’t cause because I sailed into them like I could outrun weather. I correct. “I’m not sorry we fought for us. I’m sorry I didn’t build quieter lanes sooner.”
“Hey,” she says, thumb brushing the heel of my hand. “We’re here. That counts.”
It counts. It also asks for something from me I’ve never been any good at in public: surrender.
I inhale, slow, until the top of my lungs stops burning.
“I’m going to say this once like a vow and then a thousand more times like I mean it,” I tell her, voice rough but sure.
“I will never choose the game over you again. Not the cameras, not the contract, not the myth of being a guy who can carry everything and still call it love. If the choice is ever real, I sit. I stay. I go where you go.”
Riley’s eyes shine, not with panic this time but with something that looks like landing. She squeezes my hand hard enough to hurt, and it does, and the hurt feels like truth. “Okay,” she whispers, the word strong. “Okay.”
The monitor keeps its patient beat. The bag of saline ticks down a millimeter. Outside the curtain, the ER murmurs on, but the square of light we’re in feels stubbornly, miraculously ours.
Time stretches to the hiss of saline and the pale scroll of numbers. I measure it by the way Riley’s hand stops trying to be a fist and remembers how to be a palm.
Dr. Hassan returns with a tablet tucked to her chest and the kind of smile that only shows up when a night is going to end better than it started.
She checks the monitor one more time, brows relaxed.
“Good,” she says, and the word is a soft landing.
“No patterning. Tightening is easing. I’m comfortable sending you home after this bag and a bathroom victory lap. ”
Riley’s laugh is small and relieved. Mine is a breath I didn’t know I was holding.
Dr. Hassan taps the tablet. “You’ll go home with written instructions—hydration targets, when to call, what to ignore. And I want you both to build margins into your week. Fewer bright lights. More boring TV. Your body just wrote you a memo.” She glances between us. “You read it.”
“We’ll read it out loud to each other,” I say. It’s only half a joke.
She nods, satisfied. “One more thing.” The tone shifts from tonight to the road ahead without losing warmth.
“It’s time to start thinking about birth.
” She says it like an invitation instead of a cliff.
“Not a full plan—those change—but preferences. Support person—” her eyes flick to our hands like she’s taking attendance, “—pain management, pediatrician short list, classes if you want them, a tour so this place feels less like a spaceship at three a.m.”
The word birth lands in my chest like a dropped puck that suddenly belongs to me. Not a story, not a press conference, not a someday I can skate past. A date we don’t know yet that’s walking toward us anyway.
Riley swallows, then nods, brave in the way that doesn’t perform. “Okay,” she says. “We can do that.”
“Good,” Dr. Hassan repeats, writing something final that sounds like permission.
“We’ll follow up in the clinic. Tonight you go home, you rest, you let other people worry about the internet.
” She squeezes Riley’s shoulder again, gives me a look that says you too, and slips away, footsteps soft against the tile.
The room exhales with her. The bag empties to its last clear inch; the monitor’s ocean softens to a lazy tide. Riley turns her head on the pillow until she can see me without effort. “Birth,” she says, testing the syllable like it might crack.
“Birth,” I echo, and the echo changes the shape of the air.
I picture the rink after a win—the way sound goes high and then drops out and you can hear your own skates.
I picture a small person with a ridiculous grip around my finger.
I picture walls that don’t need soundproofing because the only noise that matters is ours.
My laugh comes out ragged around the edges. Relief, fear, awe—three forwards on one chaotic shift. “It’s not someday,” I say, and my voice isn’t TV-ready; it’s human. “It’s soon.”
Riley threads our fingers, squeeze steady enough to hurt in the good way. “Soon,” she agrees, eyes wet and clear.
Outside the curtain, a monitor alarms and then quiets, footsteps pass, a coffee machine groans awake like the night is surrendering to morning. In here, the saline line goes slack, and a nurse whose name I didn’t catch says, bright with routine, “Let’s get you unhooked.”
I stand, legs unsteady for the first time all season, and the word keeps ringing between my ribs like a bell I’m not going to un-hear.
Soon.
Weeks stretch and fold like film through a projector—checkups, kicks, names that change with the weather. The city moves from rain to snow to melt again, and every season leaves its fingerprint on the glass.
Dr. Hassan keeps her promise of conservative and careful. We learn what boring feels like, and we learn to love it. By the time spring leans toward summer, soon turns into any-day-now, and the word stops sounding like fear. It sounds like arrival.