Chương 1
"""The contraction hit before the ambulance cleared the bridge, and I bit down on the sleeve of my wet cardigan because screaming made the paramedic beside me look more frightened than I could afford for him to be.
“Claire, stay with me,” he said, one hand braced against the cabinet while the ambulance lurched through traffic.
“I’m here.”
“Any bleeding?”
“I don’t know.”
“Any complications during the pregnancy?”
“Three babies apparently wasn’t complicated enough.”
He gave me a startled glance, then smiled despite himself.
“Okay, you’re allowed one joke, but after that I need serious answers.”
Another contraction tightened across my abdomen, stealing whatever answer I might have given.
The monitor clipped around my finger showed numbers I could not stop watching even though none of them meant anything to me.
Twenty-eight weeks.
That number meant something.
I had read enough pregnancy books during Ethan’s late nights at the office to know that twenty-eight weeks was not when babies were supposed to arrive.
“Which hospital?” I asked.
“NewYork-Presbyterian.”
“My doctor is at Mount Sinai.”
“Dispatch sent us to the closest appropriate facility, and they’ve got a neonatal team waiting.”
Waiting.
For my children.
The thought made my teeth chatter harder than the cold did.
The paramedic asked for my husband’s number, and I stared at him until he lowered his pen.
“He’s on a plane.”
“Someone else, then.”
I opened my phone.
There were names everywhere, but suddenly my contacts looked like a directory belonging to somebody else.
Ethan’s mother had never called without needing something.
My own mother had died when I was nineteen.
My father had followed four years later after a stroke that turned our last conversation into an argument I could never repair.
Friends had gradually become couples Ethan approved of, executives’ wives, charity-board acquaintances, women who kissed the air beside my cheek and remembered my birthday because an assistant reminded them.
“There isn’t anyone,” I said.
The paramedic stopped writing.
He was young enough that his attempt not to react made the reaction worse.
“That’s okay,” he said.
It plainly was not okay.
At the emergency entrance, the doors opened onto organized noise.
Hands moved me from the stretcher to a hospital bed while questions came from three directions.
A nurse cut away my soaked stockings.
Another pushed my hair from my forehead and asked whether I had allergies.
A doctor introduced herself as Dr. Elena Ruiz, then repeated her name when she saw that I had not processed it.
“We’re going to try to slow the contractions,” she said.
“Try?”
“That’s the honest word.”
I appreciated her immediately and hated her for it.
“Are they alive?”
“Yes.”
“All three?”
“All three have heart activity.”
“Then stop this.”
“We’re working on it.”
“No, I mean stop them from coming.”
Her expression softened without becoming reassuring.
“We’re going to do everything we safely can.”
Someone asked about insurance.
I gave Ethan’s company plan information from memory.
The admissions clerk typed for several seconds, frowned, then typed again.
“Mrs. Mercer, do you have another policy?”
“No.”
She looked toward the nurse.
The nurse looked back with the particular irritation of someone who had encountered bureaucracy at the worst possible moment.
“Her coverage is showing inactive.”
Of course it was.
I laughed.
It came out too loudly.
Dr. Ruiz glanced up from the monitor.
“Something funny?”
“My husband works fast.”
The contraction that followed folded me nearly in half.
Afterward, when I could breathe again, I found the admissions clerk still standing there.
“I can’t pay,” I told her.
“We’re treating you.”
“I mean afterward.”
“Afterward can wait.”
It was the first kind thing anyone had said to me all night, and naturally that was what made me cry.
They moved me upstairs while magnesium burned through my IV and made my body feel heavy and strange.
A neonatal specialist explained survival rates and ventilators and possible complications, carefully avoiding promises.
I signed consent forms with the same hand that had signed away my marriage hours earlier.
The resemblance bothered me more than it should have.
Every terrible thing seemed to require my signature.
Shortly after two in the morning, the contractions began spacing out.
Dr. Ruiz called that encouraging but refused to call it good.
I lay in a dim room listening to three separate heartbeats on the monitors.
They overlapped like horses running somewhere far away.
For eleven minutes, nothing happened.
Nobody betrayed me.
Nobody asked me to leave.
Nobody mentioned money.
A nurse named Tasha brought warm socks and complained that the vending machine had stolen two dollars from her.
I almost told her I could reimburse her, then remembered I had less money than the vending machine.
“You want ice chips?” she asked.
“I want a cheeseburger.”
“You and everybody on magnesium.”
“With pickles.”
“That’s where you lose me.”
“Extra pickles.”
Tasha shook her head as if my judgment had become medically concerning.
When she left, I checked my phone.
Ethan had sent one message.
Signed copy received.
No question about where I was.
No question about the babies.
I stared at the words until the screen dimmed.
Then I deleted the message, immediately regretted deleting it, and spent five ridiculous minutes searching for a way to restore it.
I was still doing that when a man began arguing quietly in the corridor.
He did not raise his voice.
He did not need to.
“I asked why she was transferred without the attending cardiologist being notified.”
A nervous male voice answered something I could not hear.
“Then find out.”
Footsteps approached.
My door opened, and a tall man in a black overcoat stepped halfway inside before stopping.
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
Neither of us spoke.
He was perhaps forty, with dark hair beginning to silver near the temples and the exhausted expression of someone who had forgotten that sleep was a biological requirement.
“This isn’t my mother’s room,” he said.
May you like
“I hope not.”
His gaze flicked toward my stomach, then the monitors.
