“Oh God, I don’t know if I can do this!” I groan, gripping the bedcovers and cringing as another rush of pain moves through me.
“You’re going to be alright,” the nurse, Gina, tells me. “Trust me, plenty of women have done this before you, and plenty of women are going to do it after you. Now, I’m just going to check how dilated you are…”
As she lifts up the edge of my rather undignified hospital robe, I sink back into the pillow and try to catch my breath before the next contraction. I feel as though I’m going to burst with the pain. I knew giving birth would be hard, but this—this is way more than anything I could ever have expected.
And for the hundredth time in the last nine months, I wonder if that anonymous hookup at the party was worth it.
I wince as I feel Gina moving between my legs, and let out a sharp breath when she comes back up—there’s a grim expression on her face, and she nods.
“I’m going to get the doctor on call,” she tells me. “It looks like you’re nearly ready. Do you want me to call for your husband, your boyfriend…?”
“Uh, no,” I blurt out, feeling a stab of shame amongst the pain, just in case I wasn’t going through enough. Because the truth is, of course, that I don’t have any man to be here with me.
Cara is in the waiting room, probably sipping on her twentieth coffee of the night and pacing back and forth, if I know her. She’s about the only person I still have left over from my old life, after this pregnancy tore apart everything I had been working toward, and I am beyond thankful that she offered to come with me to the hospital.
She tried to insist on coming into the actual delivery room with me, but I was quick to shut that down. I might love her, but there are some things you just don’t want your best friend to see—and this is sure as hell one of them.
“Of course,” Gina replies gently, and she reaches out to give my hand a squeeze. “You’re doing amazing, sweetie. Just a little longer, alright?”
I manage to nod before she rushes from the room, and I grope for the glass of water on the bedside table next to me as another deep twinge begins in my lower belly. I writhe on the bed, sweat leaping to my brow, but I manage to gulp down a few sips before I have to focus on my contractions once more.
I breathe through them as best I can, trying to remember what the leader of that birthing class told me—the birthing class I attended the week after I officially dropped out of my internship position with the councilor.
At least I managed to finish school before all of this happened…I was a few months into the pregnancy by the time I realized I was with child, and I put in the last of my coursework before this pregnancy could derail that part of my life too.
I didn’t even think about the possibility of being pregnant at first, even as my period stopped and I started noticing a sudden bloat to my belly. Because I am not the kind of girl who does something so reckless as to become pregnant by a stranger she has never laid eyes on before—a stranger whose face I’ve never seen, whose name I don’t even know. Not like I can just reach out to him and let him know what’s been going on. Hey, remember that girl you had sex with a few months ago? Well, she’s in the process of having your baby right now…
The thought is pushed from my mind as another rush of pain courses through me. Much to my relief, Gina appears in the doorway, and this time, she’s followed by a man I assume is the doctor.
Through my blurry gaze, I feel like I know him from somewhere. His mouth is set in a hard, determined line, and he moves toward me with purpose, speaking with Gina as he does so. I’m distantly aware of the way he’s asking to be caught up on everything that’s happened, demanding to know how far along I am and what he needs to do next, but I can’t take it in—no, all of this is too enormous, too difficult for me to wrap my head around.
He snaps on a pair of gloves and turns to me, and I manage to meet his gaze, though my eyes are unsteady. I see a flash of his silver-gray hair, matching those gray eyes, before he moves closer.
“I need you to start pushing,” he tells me, and there’s a note of urgency to his voice, as though he knows we have no time to waste. “You understand?”
I nod, tightening my grip on the covers. I feel as though my knuckles are about to burst out from beneath my skin, but if what he’s telling me is true, then I only have a few more minutes to get through.
And then I get to meet my daughter.
My heart swells with excitement at the thought. That’s the only thing getting me through this, the thought of holding my little girl in my arms. I know there are plenty of people in my old line of work who think I’m stone-cold crazy for leaving to have her. But the truth is, the moment I saw her on that ultrasound for the first time, I knew there was no way I could go without her.
I wanted to cradle her in my arms, even then. I wanted nothing more than to tell her how much I adore her, and how I will spend the rest of my life trying to make the world as beautiful for her as I can.
I bear down as I start to push, and Gina pushes the bottom of my skirt up. There are other people in the room now, but I can’t take them in. There’s just a rush of sound and voices and pain, and the feeling of something pushing from between my legs. My ears are ringing, and I feel like I might pass out from the sheer strain of going on when it feels like my body is going to burst…
And then, something cuts through the chaos in my mind. The sound of a cry—a baby’s cry. I gasp, and my head snaps up, despite my exhaustion. She’s here!
My heart leaps in my chest, and through the blur in my vision, I can see her. Gina is holding her, the umbilical cord still connecting her to me, and I feel a rush of emotion so intense I want to burst into tears on the spot.
“Oh God!” I cry out, and I reach my arms out for her at once. My instincts are so profound and so intense—I just want to pull her close to me and tell her how much I love her already. Gina offers me a smile as she swiftly and with a deft hand swaddles Polly and hands her to me.
“Here you go,” she tells me as she lays my little girl down in my arms. I gaze down at her for a long moment, marveling at the sight of her right in front of me. All this time, I’ve been wondering what it would feel like to have her here, right where she belongs—what it would feel like to stare at her and drink in the sight of her for the first time. Our very first meeting, her tiny body in my arms, her big blue-gray eyes staring back at me. There’s even a tuft of dark hair on her head, and I brush my fingers over it almost reverently as I take her in.
Suddenly, I sense a shift in the room around me. I glance up to find the doctor standing at the foot of the bed, staring down at me.
I quickly close my legs and go to pull down my robe. I guess I forget that I’m not exactly in the most dignified state right now. I offer him a smile, but he’s not looking at my face. No, he’s staring down at something just below my line of sight, something I can’t quite make out—but the expression on his face tells me that something has thrown him off his game entirely.
“Is everything okay?” I ask worriedly—the question is aimed at him, but Gina comes bustling in to answer it instead, as she goes about cleaning me up.
“Everything’s perfect,” she promises me, a smile spreading over her face. “You did a wonderful job, sweetie. And your little girl looks healthy—we’ll need to take her to get weighed and cleaned properly, but she seems in good shape to me.”
“Good,” I murmur, and I brush off the paranoia at the back of my mind about the way the doctor is looking at me. It’s likely nothing more than hormones flying out of control—I’ve been warned about this postpartum period and how tough the anxiety can be, and while I didn’t expect it to start quite so soon, surely that’s all it is.
“In fact, I think we’ll take her off to get that done now,” Gina adds, once the cord has been cut and the bed has been cleaned as best it can. “Do you mind if I borrow your little girl for a while, Katie?”
“Not at all,” I laugh, but the truth is, I’m not exactly delighted at being separated from her so soon. I clutch her close to me for one last moment, breathing in the dreamy scent of her head and planting a kiss on her ridiculously chubby cheek, before I hand her over to Gina, who swiftly whisks her out of the room.
And as I catch my breath, I realize that almost everyone else has left with her. The only person still standing over me right now is the doctor who helped deliver my baby—I heard Gina call him “Luca” at some point.
And there’s that look again, that look that threw me off so badly before—the look that tells me that something is bothering him, something about me, something about this.
I offer him a quick smile, hoping I can diffuse the situation, but it doesn’t change his stony approach. What the hell is his problem? Is he one of those guys who doesn’t like it when he finds out a woman is having a baby on her own? Despite the streaks of silver in his dark hair, he doesn’t look old enough to hold views like that, but I guess you can’t judge a book by its cover…
Luca pushes the door shut slowly, and I track his movement with my gaze as he travels toward the edge of the bed. There’s something in the way he’s looking at me that I recognize, something I can’t quite put my finger on. Even through the rush of everything that has happened, I can’t seem to place it. My mind gropes about for something to make sense of this, but I come back with nothing—at least, until he leans down and lowers his face just a few inches in front of my own.
“You really don’t recognize me, Katie?”
And then it hits me.
My hand flies to my mouth, my eyebrows shooting upward, my stomach twisting.
I know who he is.
It’s him.
