Life after Goodbye novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: Eight Hours

Cormac's POV

I have delivered more than two thousand babies, and I did not know where to put my hands.

My partner ran the room, because I had made that rule myself, and at thirty-four weeks the neonatal team stood ready down the hall.

A doctor does not deliver the woman he loves.

I had said it to Calla in February, and she had said it was the most romantic thing a man ever refused her.

In the third hour of labor she looked at me from the bed, grey-faced and furious.

"You're pacing," she said.

"I'm not."

"You're wearing a groove in the floor. Go sit with my father."

"Calla..."

"He's out there alone, and you're making the nurses nervous." She gripped the rail through a contraction and breathed out slowly. "Go. Come back when I scream your name."

"You've been screaming my name since ten."

"Then come back when I mean it."

My partner didn't look up from her chart, but I saw her mouth twitch.

I went.

The waiting room on the fourth floor was empty except for one old man in a tweed cap, holding a paper cup with both hands.

He had been there since midnight.

Nobody had told him he could sit in the family lounge with the sofa.

I sat down beside him in the plastic chair.

"Dr. Hagan," Calla's father said. "I wasn't sure I should come."

"You should."

"Ansel offered to drive me. I said no." He looked at the cup. "I wanted to be alone when I heard."

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