Chapter 22: Same Door, Different Day

Joanna's POV

"Should I call 911?" Bennett said, hopping on one foot with a shoe in his hand.

"Don't you dare."

"Jo, there's a protocol."

"The protocol is you drive."

I was sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark with both hands on my stomach, breathing the way the class had taught me.

The pain went away, slowly, and I looked at the clock.

"Six minutes apart," I said. "Get the bag."

"The bag," said Bennett, and walked into the closet door.

He did not hurry on the stairs, because I told him not to.

He drove the dull gray sedan that Beatrice called a sensible car, with both hands on the wheel.

I put my feet up on the dashboard.

At a red light on Fifth, a contraction folded me over, and I swore at the light, the city and the man beside me.

"Okay," he said, quietly. "Okay."

"Don't say okay."

"I love you."

"Don't say that either!"

"I'm sorry," said Bennett, and ran the light.

The hospital was the same one.

I saw the entrance from half a block away, the glass doors and the ambulance bay.

That was where they had wheeled me in on the last day of December, with blood on my jeans.

It hit me in the chest, and for a second I could not breathe.

"Jo?"

"It's the same door."

He pulled up under the awning and was out of the car before it stopped rolling.

He came around and opened my side, and he crouched so that his eyes were level with mine.

"Different door," he said. "Different day. And I'm here."

I held on to his collar and laughed, and cried.

A wheelchair rolled up behind him, and Teagan was pushing it, in her scrubs, with her red hair in its messy knot.

"Whose idea was it to have a baby at three in the morning?" said Teagan.

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