Next Time Away novel · Chapter 7 of 24
Chapter 7: The Vending Machine
They sent me home on the fourth day and kept Greta.
The doctor said three weeks, maybe less, until she could hold her own temperature and eat without a tube.
I did not go home.
Jonas drove me to the hospital every day, in the green truck.
I had stopped asking him about the license.
On the ninth day Soren was already at the NICU when I got there.
He sat in the plastic chair beside the isolette with a foil-covered dish on his knees.
"Dagny made lasagna," he said. "She says you need your strength."
"Tell her I said thank you," I said. "And that I'm not eating it."
"Tove."
"I won't put anything of hers in my body, Soren. I'm feeding a baby."
He set the dish on the floor beside his chair.
I watched him look at our daughter.
He looked at her for a little while, and then his phone buzzed in his pocket.
He took it out and read it.
He typed something with his thumbs and put it away.
Then he looked at Greta again, a little guiltily.
I knew who had texted him.
I knew who had been texting him all week, every few minutes, every time he sat near me.
"You can go," I said. "You've stayed your twenty minutes."
"I want to stay longer."
"You want to be told to."
He stared at me, and I saw that I was right.
He left a card on the isolette with a snowman on it.
The snowman wore a green scarf.
That night I could not sleep.
I sat in the NICU waiting room at three in the morning with a blanket around my shoulders, listening to a machine hum, and a monitor beep somewhere down the hall.
My milk had come in, and it hurt.
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