Chương 3
Her voice was dry. Familiar.
He eased off the gas.
“Sorry.”
“You keep saying that.”
“I keep needing to.”
She turned toward the passenger window.
Pale morning had settled over Westchester. Delivery trucks blocked narrow streets. A man in a knit cap walked a small dog that stopped in the middle of a crosswalk and refused to move. Adrian watched the owner tug uselessly at the leash while the light changed.
Under different circumstances, Claire would have commented on the dog’s moral clarity.
He nearly said so. The words felt obscene.
At the hospital entrance, he pulled into the drop-off lane and helped her out. She accepted his arm only when another tightening seized her. Her grip was stronger than he expected.
Inside, the woman at the registration desk asked ordinary questions in an ordinary voice. Date of birth. Insurance. Emergency contact. Claire answered until the woman asked whether she felt safe at home.
Claire looked at Adrian.
The woman followed her gaze but did not alter her expression.
“Yes,” Claire said.
Then she added, “Now.”
The woman’s fingers paused above the keyboard.
Adrian felt the word enter the record of their lives.
They were taken upstairs. Monitors were secured around Claire’s belly. A nurse brought water and dimmed the lights, though morning had already begun to brighten the room. The baby’s heartbeat filled the space in quick, steady beats.
Adrian stood beside the bed, staring at the green lines on the screen as if attention alone could hold them level.
Claire drank half the water.
“You can sit,” she said.
“I’m fine.”
“You’ve been traveling for a day.”
“I’m fine.”
“That phrase is getting crowded.”
He sat.
The nurse asked Claire when she had last eaten. Claire hesitated.
“Yesterday afternoon,” she said.
Adrian turned toward her.
“I wasn’t hungry.”
The nurse made a note. “Any vomiting?”
“No.”
“Diarrhea?”
“No.”
“Headache, vision changes, swelling beyond what’s typical for you?”
“My hands a little.”
“Any bleeding or fluid leakage?”
“No.”
“Any fall or abdominal injury?”
Claire’s eyes moved to the monitor.
“No.”
The nurse looked at her for another second, then at Adrian.
“I’m going to get the physician,” she said. “I also need to ask some questions privately. Hospital policy.”
Adrian stood immediately.
Claire looked surprised by how quickly he moved.
“I’ll be outside.”
In the hallway, he leaned against the wall and stared at the floor tiles. His phone had accumulated nineteen notifications since landing. Six were from the Singapore team. Four were from the company’s chief financial officer. Three were from Evelyn.
He opened none of them.
A message from Claire, sent eleven hours earlier while he had been over the Pacific, sat beneath the others.
Can you call when you land? It’s not urgent.
He read it five times.
It’s not urgent.
For six weeks, her messages had grown shorter. He had told himself it was because she was tired. When she stopped sending pictures of the nursery, he assumed she had finally become bored with documenting paint samples. When she declined three video calls, blaming headaches and poor sleep, he accepted the explanation because accepting it allowed him to continue working.
The night before his departure, she had stood in their kitchen turning a paper napkin into smaller and smaller squares while he reviewed his itinerary.
“Your mother has been going through the mail,” she had said.
Adrian had looked up from his phone. “She probably moved it.”
“She opened something from my doctor.”
“Did she think it was hers?”
“It had my name on it.”
He had sighed. Not at Claire, he had later told himself. At the timing. At the fact that his mother could turn a piece of mail into a domestic emergency while a Singapore refinancing threatened the company his father had founded.
“I’ll speak to her when I’m back,” he said.
“I’d rather she stay at the apartment while you’re gone.”
“She fell in that apartment.”
“Three months ago.”
“And she’s still doing physical therapy.”
“She wears four-inch heels to physical therapy.”
He had almost smiled. Claire had not.
“Please,” she said.
Adrian remembered checking the time. He remembered the tightening in his chest, the sense that both women were asking him to declare a winner in a contest he had never agreed to judge.
“I need this trip to be clean,” he told her. “No crises. No family war. Just ten days. Can you both try not to provoke each other until I get home?”
Claire placed the folded napkin beside his phone.
“Sure,” she said.
He had kissed her forehead and gone upstairs to finish packing.
In the hospital hallway, Adrian covered his face with both hands.
The door opened. The nurse stepped out.
“She said you can come back.”
Claire lay on her side now. Her eyes were dry. A physician in blue scrubs stood near the foot of the bed, reviewing the monitor strip.
“The good news,” the physician said, “is that the baby looks reassuring. Claire is having uterine contractions, but there’s no significant cervical change right now. Dehydration and stress can contribute. We’re going to give her fluids, observe her, and repeat the exam.”
Adrian nodded.
“Is the baby coming?”
“Not at this moment.”
“Could that change?”
“It could. She’s thirty-four weeks, so we take it seriously, but nothing I’m seeing says delivery is imminent. Our job is to calm things down and make sure there isn’t another issue contributing.”
Claire watched Adrian absorb each word as though it were a sentence being handed down.
The physician addressed her. “The nurse mentioned a difficult situation at home.”
Claire’s fingers moved over the edge of the blanket.
“My mother-in-law was staying with us.”
“And she is no longer there?”
“No.”
“Do you expect her to return?”
Claire looked at Adrian.
“No,” he said.
The physician’s gaze remained on Claire.
May you like
“No,” Claire repeated.
They were given time. Fluids ran through a clear line into Claire’s arm. Adrian moved the chair closer to the bed but left a careful distance between them.
