He Missed the Delivery Room. I Married His Enemy Instead. novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Nine Centimeters
Brigid ends her marriage on speakerphone in labor, gives birth without Davis, learns his trip was a signing for towers on her trauma center's land, and finds Conall Byrne in her doorway asking her to marry him.
I was nine centimeters dilated when my husband called from thirty thousand feet.
He wasn't flying home to me.
He was flying to Gwyneth.
"Brigid, you're being dramatic," Davis said through the phone propped on my tray table. "She's alone in a hotel in Baltimore. She couldn't stop shaking."
"Your daughter is being born," I said. "Turn the plane around."
"You know first babies take hours. You're the doctor."
A contraction locked around my spine.
I held the bed rail and didn't make a sound.
Seven years in a trauma bay had trained the scream out of me.
On the phone, behind his voice, a woman laughed.
It wasn't a shaking laugh.
It was the laugh of someone being handed a drink.
"You know what she's been through," Davis said.
I did know.
I'd been paying for it for four years.
On my thirtieth birthday, Gwyneth cried about a client, and Davis left before the entrees came.
On our anniversary, her dog ate a sock at midnight.
He came home at nine the next morning smelling like her shampoo.
Last night my water broke on our kitchen floor.
An hour later Gwyneth texted him a photo of her smartwatch, to show him her racing pulse.
He kissed my forehead and booked a red-eye.
He forwarded me the photo from the cab, so I'd understand.
I opened it now and zoomed in.
The watch said sixty-four beats a minute.
I've taken ten thousand pulses.
Sixty-four is a woman lying on a hotel bed, bored.
I made my voice flat and level.
It was the voice I use when a patient's pressure is falling and the room can't know it yet.
"Davis. One question. Can you be at Mercy General in the next three hours? Yes or no."
"Brig."
"Yes or no."
"I'm in the air. It's not possible." That laugh again. "Just film it. Let your mother cut the cord. Everyone will understand."
"My mother has been in this room for eleven hours," I said.
"My father is in the chapel. My grandfather flew in from Cork with an oxygen tank to meet her."
In the corner, Grandda lifted his tank an inch off the floor.
"So they'll meet her. I'll be there tomorrow."
Something in my chest went quiet.
Not loud. Quiet, the way a house goes quiet after the fire is out.
"Listen to me," I said. "If you aren't in this room when they cut the cord, we're finished. Not fighting. Finished."
He laughed.
"There it is. The jealousy."
His voice went cool, the Whitmarsh voice he used on waiters.
"You're hormonal. But if you want to keep me, you'll stop this. That's the deal."
My mother reached for the phone to hang up for me.
I caught her wrist.
"No," I said. "I want him to hear this."
I leaned toward the speaker.
"I don't want to keep you, Davis."
Then I ended the call myself.
My mother stared at me.
Grandda took the oxygen tube out of his nose to speak.
"Good girl," he said. "Now push."
Forty minutes later my daughter came out furious and purple and yelling at the lights.
The doctor held out the scissors to my mother.
My mother's hands shook so hard I had to guide them.
The cord was cut.
The nurse laid her on my chest, warm and slippery and heavier than I expected.
She had my red fuzz of hair and my father's scowl.
Grandda cried without a sound.
My father came up from the chapel with his rosary still in his fist.
Near midnight a nurse brought the birth certificate form on a clipboard.
"Baby's last name, Doctor?"
There was a little box for it.
I'd practiced writing Whitmarsh in that box for nine months.
I wrote Sheehan.
My mother read it over my shoulder and didn't say a word.
She squeezed my foot through the blanket.
For a first name I wrote Niamh, after Grandda's wife.
"Nobody in that family will be able to say it," my father said.
"Good," I said.
At two in the morning, my phone lit up on the tray.
It wasn't Davis.
It was a tag in a post by Gwyneth Harding.
A photo from a hotel bar in Baltimore.
Davis in his navy suit, a glass of champagne raised.
Gwyneth beside him, glowing, her head on his shoulder.
"Four years of work. Signed tonight. Harborline is HAPPENING."
The second photo was a drawing of glass towers along the water.
I knew that stretch of harbor.
I'd parked on it every day for seven years.
Where the towers stood in the drawing, there was supposed to be my trauma center.
My ambulance bay. My helipad. My doors.
His mother, Cornelia Whitmarsh, chaired Mercy's board.
She must have known for months.
He hadn't flown to her panic attack.
He'd flown to sell my hospital out from under me.
Someone knocked on the doorframe.
I looked up, expecting a nurse.
A tall man in a dark overcoat stood there, snow melting on his shoulders.
Black hair, silver at the temples. Pale green eyes. A pale scar showed at the open collar of his shirt.
I knew that scar.
I'd made it.
Three years ago I'd opened his chest in my trauma bay and held his heart shut with my hand.
Conall Byrne.
The man Davis's family had spent fifty years trying to put in prison.
He held up a thick folder.
"Congratulations, Dr. Sheehan," he said quietly. "Your husband just sold your hospital."
He looked at my daughter, then back at me.
"I'm going to buy it back. And to do that, I need a wife."
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