The Day Two Sisters Burned for Husbands Who Never Came novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Two Cribs

Calla and Bree each give birth at County General under their maiden name while Ansel guards the door. Dalton, Corey and Imogen walk into the NICU hall.

The emergency room at County General put me face down on a bed and cut my shirt off my back.

A nurse peeled the burned fabric away from my shoulder blade in strips.

I held the bed rail and said every curse word I knew.

"Second degree, mostly," the doctor said. "It'll scar. Is there someone we can call for you, Mrs. Overpeck?"

"MacDuff," I said into the pillow. "My name is MacDuff."

"We'll chart it that way."

The curtain next to mine slid open, and a nurse wheeled Bree past, doubled over her stomach.

"It's early," Bree said. "Calla, it's too early, I'm only thirty-three weeks."

"The smoke did it," the nurse said. "Her contractions are four minutes apart. We're taking her up."

"I'm coming," I said.

I tried to push myself up, and something in me gave.

Warm water ran down my legs and onto the clean floor.

The doctor looked at it and then at me.

"Well," she said. "That's your baby too."

I laughed, and then I was crying into the pillow, and I could not tell which one was which.

Somebody stood in the curtain gap with his helmet still under one arm.

It was the lieutenant from the ladder.

His face was still streaked with soot, and he had not gone home or changed his coat.

"Ma'am, I'll go," Ansel Killian said. "I wanted to see you were all right."

"Don't go," I said. I had not planned to say it.

He stayed where he was.

"My husband's station will find out where we are," I said. "Probably in an hour."

"Dispatch logs the transport. They'll see County General."

"I don't want him up here."

Ansel looked at the burn on my back, and then at the doctor, who was pretending to read a chart.

"I can't keep a captain out of a hospital," he said. "I can make sure nobody hands him your room number."

"How?"

"You're registered as MacDuff. There's no Overpeck on any board in this building." He turned to the nurse at the desk and said quietly, "The two women from Cedar Street. MacDuff and MacDuff. They're not to be given out to anyone. Any caller, any badge."

The nurse looked at me.

I nodded.

"Okay," she said. "MacDuff and MacDuff. Not given out."

My son was born at 9:52 that night.

He was small and furious, and he had a full head of dark hair like his father's.

I held him for one minute against my chest, careful of the burn, before they took him to the NICU to put a tube in his nose for the smoke.

I kept thinking about Dalton's hands.

He had washed them every morning for three years with the green soap from the station, and he'd said he would be the first to hold our baby.

I held our son first, with nobody's hand on mine.

Bree's daughter came at 10:41, loud and blue-pink and two pounds under what anybody wanted.

I watched them wheel the little cart past my door with her inside.

Bree was weeping when they brought her to my room afterward in a chair.

"Corey doesn't know," she said. "He doesn't know he has a daughter."

"No."

"Maybe he didn't hear the phone." She wiped her face with the back of her hand. "Maybe there was a stabbing, maybe he was in the middle of something."

"Maybe," I said.

"Dalton wouldn't, though. Dalton is a firefighter. Dalton wouldn't just..."

She stopped.

I didn't say anything.

I had nothing to say to Bree that would help her.

Dalton's phone had cut me off after one ring, and I did not know yet what that meant.

Around midnight a woman with a lanyard came into our room with a clipboard.

She said she was from patient affairs, and she wanted the insurance cards.

She was around fifty, with reading glasses pushed up in her gray hair, and she was careful not to look at my back.

Out in the hall, the elevator opened.

Ansel's chair scraped at the door, and he stood up fast.

I got out of bed with the IV pole and went to the window in the door.

At the end of the hall, outside the NICU glass, three people had come in together.

Dalton was in his uniform, with soot on his boots, and he was walking faster than anyone.

Corey was beside him, with his jaw set.

Imogen had her arm through Dalton's, and her cardigan sleeve was pushed up to hold on tighter.

My husband had come to the hospital with her on his arm.

I turned around.

The woman from patient affairs was still holding her clipboard.

I pulled my phone out of the pocket of the hospital gown and put it in her hand.

"Read it," I said. "All of it. Then tell me what you would do."

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