Then another came seven minutes later.
Then six.
Then five.
She called Clare.
“It’s time,” Madison said.
Clare did not ask if Ethan was there.
She already knew the answer.
“I’m leaving work now.”
“You do not have to speed.”
“I am already grabbing my purse.”
Clare arrived with an oversized hoodie, a paper bag from Panera, and eyes that turned wet the second she saw Madison leaning against the hallway wall.
When Madison reached for the hospital bag, Clare took it first.
“No,” she said. “You’ve carried enough.”
At labor and delivery, a nurse looked at the computer and nodded.
“Your chart is marked private, Mrs. Walker. Your approved support person is Clare Benton?”
Clare raised one hand.
“That’s me.”
The nurse looked at Madison.
“Still correct?”
“Yes.”
“Approved contacts are Clare Benton, Robert Miller, and Elaine Miller?”
“My parents,” Madison said.
“No one else?”
Madison felt Ethan’s name in the silence.
Then she felt the baby turn inside her.
“No one else.”
Labor was not graceful.
It was sweat, monitors, cold water, shaking knees, and Clare’s steady hand rubbing the base of Madison’s spine.
It was nurses speaking gently while doing necessary things.
It was the sound of her son’s heartbeat filling the room, steady and stubborn.
Around midnight, Ethan texted.
Landed. Hotel is nice. Try not to stress.
Madison was six centimeters dilated.
She stared at the words until a contraction rose so hard she forgot the phone existed.
By the time it passed, Ethan had become background noise.
At 3:42 in the morning, Noah James Walker entered the world furious.
His cry was so loud one nurse laughed and said, “He has opinions.”
They placed him on Madison’s chest, warm and slippery and real.
For one wild second she looked toward the side of the bed where she had once imagined Ethan standing.
Clare was there instead, crying into one hand.
“Oh, Maddie,” she whispered. “He’s perfect.”
Madison looked down at her son.
“He is.”
James was her father’s middle name.
Ethan had kept saying they had time to decide.
They had not had as much time as he thought.
By morning, Rebecca had filed the first documents they had prepared.
