Chapter 23: Three

My water broke at two in the morning, in the kitchen, on the night the lake froze.

I was thirty-two weeks along, and I had known it would be early.

Knowing did not help.

"Ambrose," I said.

He was beside me before I finished the word.

He had felt it through the bond a heartbeat before I spoke.

His face had gone white.

"The bag's in the hall," I said. "June's number is on the fridge. Don't drive like a king."

"I won't drive at all," he said. "Sybilla."

Sybilla came down the stairs in her nightgown with the car keys already in her hand.

She had been a nurse once, and she drove us to the hospital an hour away in forty minutes.

I would like to say it was calm.

It was not.

The contractions came every two minutes.

Ambrose gripped my hand across the back seat and made small broken noises that had nothing to do with me.

"You're feeling it," I gasped.

"Every one."

"Then breathe, you idiot, and let me do the work."

"I'm trying."

The hospital lights came up out of the dark.

June was waiting at the doors in her coat, because Sybilla had called her from the road.

"Try harder," she told Ambrose, and took the other side of the wheelchair.

They put me on a table in a white room.

An obstetrician, two nurses and a neonatal team of six took up places around me.

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