Chapter 5: Discharge

They discharged me on the sixth day, and Maddy stayed.

That was the rule for a baby who had been born at thirty-three weeks. She needed to gain weight, and I needed to heal.

I signed the papers in a wheelchair beside the nurses' station with a plastic bag of my own belongings on my knees.

Zelda stood behind me, holding the car seat we weren't going to need for two more weeks.

"You can still change your mind," the discharge nurse said gently. "Plenty of couples find a way."

"I know."

"Do you have someone to take you home?"

"I'm taking her home," Zelda said.

The nurse nodded and wrote it down.

We rolled out toward the lobby elevators.

The doors opened on the ground floor, and a woman stood waiting in front of them with her handbag held tight against her chest.

She was fifty-eight, in a navy wool coat and pearl earrings, and she had Dean's jaw.

"Claire."

"Hello," I said.

"I need to speak with you," Dean's mother said. "Alone."

"Anything you say to me, you can say in front of Zelda."

"Then I'll say it in front of all of them." She raised her voice enough for the security desk to look up.

"My son works eighty hours a week. He gave you a home and a name."

"And you served him with divorce papers in a hospital. Do you know what that did to him?"

"I know what it did to me."

"You're making a scene over one bad afternoon."

"My daughter was born seven weeks early in a surgery room."

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