Chapter 16: Early Labor

Three weeks later I was standing at a whiteboard in Patrick's conference room, rehearsing the Littlebird launch, when my water broke.

It ran down my legs onto his carpet.

"Oh," I said.

The engineers at the table stopped typing.

Patrick was across the room before I finished the word.

"How far apart?" he said.

"Nothing yet. It's too early, she isn't due for five weeks."

"She doesn't know that," said Patrick, and he picked up my bag from the chair.

He had packed it himself two weeks before and left it under his desk.

"Call Bea," I said, as he steered me into the elevator. "And tell the detective. All of it, now."

"Already done."

"Patrick."

"I called them when you stood up."

The first contraction took me in the car.

I gripped the door handle and breathed through my teeth, and he drove with both hands and ran two yellow lights.

The new hospital had a main ward with twelve rooms around a central desk, and every room had a window onto the hall.

The doctor in her fifties met us at the doors.

"You're a few weeks early," she said, "but she's a good size. Let's get you upstairs."

She put me in a room at the end of the corridor, and she posted a security guard outside it.

I had been in labor for five hours when I heard her voice in the hall.

I would have known it anywhere.

"I am the grandmother," Marilyn Alden said, loudly and calmly. "I have the proxy. Please move aside."

I pushed myself up on the bed, still gripping the rail.

Patrick was already at the door.

"Help me up," I said.

"Cora, you can't."

"I'm not letting her do this where I can't see it."

The nurse said I should not, and then she put her arm under mine, because she saw my face.

We came out into the corridor in the cotton gown, with a monitor strap around my belly and Patrick at my elbow.

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